


half-light

by skuls



Series: Half-Light Universe [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s01e01 Pilot, F/M, Post-Episode AU: s10e04 Home Again, basically a redo, this is a rewrite of the original just to be clear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-09-11 05:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 73,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8956522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: **rewrite of the original**Mulder and Scully get a second chance.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> you may recognize this if you've read the original. this is very similar but also kind of a different take, and also an attempt by me to reexplore some things.
> 
> warning for depictions of death, blood, etc.

**one.**

_2016_

It’s not a question at this point of how many times this has happened, but a question of “is this the time that will do it”. Mulder could try and romanticize it, but there’s nothing there to romanticize. He holds Scully as she bleeds out. And then he’s shot in the back.

It’s a case, and it feels like the beginning of something at the end of something else, and he thought he had her back, finally. But she’s faster than him when chasing a suspect now. She chases the suspect into an alley, and he’s trying to catch up when he hears the gunshot.

It’s such a mundane sound for them that he almost convinces himself it’s nothing, she’s always come out fine, it’s not going to end now. And then he rounds the corner and sees her on the dirty pavement, a puddle of blood rapidly forming on her shirt.

He can’t get to her fast enough. “Scully, Scully, god,” he whispers, going down beside her and pulling her into his arms. Her gun slips from her hand and clatters to the ground. The suspect is running away, but Mulder has never cared less. “God, no,” he moans, pressing his palm against the wound. She winces, gasping for breath, her head resting against his shoulder and her eyes wide and fading. Her blood is soaking the both of them and no, no, it can’t end like this, after everything they’ve been through, twenty-three goddamn years… “You’re gonna be okay,” he says, cupping her cheek with one hand and fumbling for his cell phone with the other, smearing blood across his suit pants.

The second gunshot explodes all around him, and he gasps with the pain. It’s worse than he’d remembered, and he can’t do this now, he has to save Scully, but he’s slumped helplessly over her, their blood mingling. A romantic statement almost. (And there is the romanticism, their blood is close as they have always been, a bond two decades deep.)

He thinks she tries to say his name, blood spilling over her lips as they shape the first syllable. He would tell her not to try if he could. He brushes his knuckle against her cheek. He leaves behind a smear of blood. He thinks he feels rain, but it’s not raining in DC.

***

_“Thanks,” she mutters, accepting the coffee he hands her without looking up from the file. She’s wearing glasses and pajamas with her hair pulled up, and that level of concentration is one he usually sees on himself. He’s been staying with her since the funeral; they haven’t talked about what it means._

_“I was thinking…” he starts, pretending to examine the crime scene photos. “You called me Fox.”_

_Scully gives him a look over the top of her glasses. “It felt right,” she says._

_“You’ve only ever called me that twice.”_

_“You asked me not to.”_

_He chuckles softly. “It was just… interesting.”_

_“Mm-hmm.” She nods, writing something down quickly._

_A strand of hair is loose by her ear. He holds back the urge to tuck it back. “I was also thinking about when we first met,” he says. “It’ll be twenty-three years in March.”_

_This finally gets her to look up at him, and she smiles. “It feels like longer.”_

_“I can’t imagine what you were thinking on our first case.”_

_“I can,” she says, resting her forehead against his shoulder. “It was: this guy’s insane.”_

_He recognizes the teasing bite in her voice and he nudges her. “Seriously, Scully.”_

_“Seriously. I thought: clearly, this guy’s going to get himself killed someday.”_

***

_1993_

They’d lost a hell of a lot more than nine minutes. A flipbook of a sea of broken glass and blood, twisted metal, rain pouring into the gaps left by the broken car, paramedics shouting, “We’re losing them!” Scully has life pushed into her, and it makes no sense, because she was dead. And wasn’t she in Washington, DC, not in Bellefleur, Oregon? How could they be inches away from the place where Mulder spray painted an orange X in 1993, the place they returned to in 2000 just before Mulder was taken?

When the paramedics shout, “We’ve got a rhythm!” Scully moves her eyes towards the sound.  

_Mulder…_

Because it’s Mulder they’re talking about, sprawled limp out on the pavement inches away from her. Except it’s not. It’s the Mulder she knew on a night in Bellefleur, when he sat on the floor of the hotel room and told her about his sister. Not a day older.

_Oh, god,_ she thinks briefly, sinking into darkness. _What’s happened?_

***

She’s been dead here, in this place, wherever it is. But she had been dead in the other place, too. She’s not sure what’s reality, but is there such a thing as a twenty-three year dream? Where you feel pain? Of course, that’s not to say she hasn’t felt pain here, there’s been plenty of that accompanying her recovery. It’s unexplainable, but she supposes that if she was in the afterlife, someone here would remember what she’s saying about the life she’s lived thus far. Twenty-three years…

“It’s not 1993,” she says, days later, after she has improved considerably, sitting up in her hospital bed. The sheet is damp where her sweaty hands clutch it. “It’s 2016. Agent Mulder and I were chasing a suspect in DC when I was… shot, and…”

(She already knows this isn’t the case. She’s seen herself. She’s exponentially younger, unscarred. But still, she pushes. Tries to hold onto any strings tying her to 2016.)

“Miss Scully…” The nurse meets her eyes gravely. “It’s 1993. You and Mr. Mulder were driving back from a crime scene when your car crashed at an estimated time of 9:03 PM. You both arrested on the side of the road, but the paramedics were able to revive you.”

“I… that’s impossible, though! It’s been twenty-three years! The car didn’t crash, we… we just lost nine minutes.” She falters. _We lost what? Nine minutes!_

The nurse looks worried, and Scully has the sense to stop. The last thing she needs at the moment is to be moved to the psych ward. “How is Agent Mulder?” she asks, changing the subject quickly. (She’s been bursting with the pain of not knowing, but it’s still taken her days to ask. _He can’t be in bad condition, they would’ve told me if he was…_ )

“He’s doing fine.”

Oh, god. _Fine._ She’s used that word as a defense mechanism so often that its meaning has practically changed to mean the opposite of. Or maybe it hasn’t, and fine means fine, for once. Maybe Mulder really is okay. Mentally, he’s probably a hell of a better than she is.

She wonders if this is her hell, a hospital where nothing of the past has happened and twenty-three years of her life are seemingly gone. But did she ever really have those years? Is it a hell when every torture of the past is gone in a few seconds?

***

He has fought like hell to get here, argued with the nurses and doctors, insisted that he needed to see his partner (the first thing he’d said after waking up was _is Scully alive, where is she?_ ), but now that he’s here, outside her room, he’s not sure if it’s the best idea. She hasn’t seen him yet, and she’s looking down at her hands folded in her lap. She looks so… different, so much younger. Exactly like the first time she entered his office, when he’d shaken her hand and excused her of being a spy. Of course, if what everyone is saying is true, then she really is that young, and so is he. It’s 1993, not 2016.

Mulder turns away from the door, banging his fist against the wall. God, he’d watched her die again in that alley. Except it had been real, and very different from that time with Bowman. They’d both died in a dirty alley and now… And now, here they are. Wherever _here_ is.

Mulder has mentally gone through every possible explanation, and hasn’t found one that makes sense. It can’t be a dream. People don’t feel pain in a dream, and he has felt plenty, in both places. They were dead, and now they are here. Is this some strange version of the afterlife, where an unscarred Scully sits before him?

He grasps for some wild explanation. _Maybe this is some… illusion, maybe the Syndicate has caught up again and they’re manipulating us, our thoughts, maybe we’re hallucinating again…_

“Excuse me.”

Mulder knows this voice, and he immediately steps back and stares as Bill Scully pushes past him into Scully’s hospital room. Something must be wrong, if Scully’s brother isn’t pursuing Mulder to blame him for Scully getting hurt.

Or did Bill even recognize him?

Mulder leaves.

***

If this really is 1993, his parents must be alive. He doesn’t remember his mother’s phone number, much less his father’s, and he has to look it up on a phone book. Phone book, he thinks wryly. Ever since the invention of modern day cell phones, he has only ever memorized one number. The only one he ever needed to. He could still rattle off the multiple variations from over the years, still punch every one of them in and listen for her voice, but he knows the effort would be useless.

When Teena Mulder picks up, he bites down on his lip to keep from crying out. He hasn’t heard his mother’s voice in years. She asks questions about his well-being, and he answers them shortly before asking, “Mom, are you okay? Are you feeling sick?”

(He can still remember the disease he hadn’t known about, the one that prompted her suicide.)

Her tone is shocked. “Yes, Fox. I’m fine.”

(Nobody has called him that in years, except for one time, on a beach, an urn at their feet…)

“And Dad?” Mulder asks. “He’s alright, too?”

She sounds more uncomfortable with this answer. “I haven’t spoken with him in quite some time, but I’m sure he’s well…”

Mulder hangs up the phone abruptly. He stares at it for a minute in disbelief before walking away. He doesn’t know how this is possible, any of it. He’d come back from the dead once, but that’s somehow more explainable than this.

***

“Dana? How are you feeling?”

The question startles Scully out of her stupor, and she stares up at Bill in surprise. She hasn’t talked to him since her mother died. (Which had not gone very well, of course; they’d both gotten in a screaming match as a result of years of tension and pain. They used to be closer, her brother and her.) Her big brother, who looks younger then he has in years. Who looks the part of 1993. Whatever illusion that is making her think it is 1993 is very effective.

“Bill?” she says in disbelief.

“They called Mom and Dad when they brought you in. I was the closest, so I drove up to check on you.” Bill smiles at her, stepping close to the bed with his arms out. (Immediately, Scully notices the absence of a ring on her brother’s finger. _Of course, he and Tara were barely dating at this point…_ ) “Can I hug you? Will I hurt you?”

She hugs her brother fiercely, more for a sense of stability than anything else. He’s about the only family member she hasn’t physically lost in the past twenty-three years. “Bill?” she says again. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from down a tunnel. She can’t see a light at the end. Just darkness. “How's… how’s Melissa?” She can barely even get the sentence out, voice shaking.

Bill pulls back to look at her in astonishment, is clearly taken aback by the question. “Melissa? She was fine the last time I talked to her. Why do you ask?”

Oh, God. Her sister is alive. Scully reaches absently for the necklace, the cross she still wears around her neck. (At least that hasn’t changed. She’s tried to feel Mulder in the small piece of metal, but he’s not there. Because he was never there in the first place.) She squeezes it hard enough to leave a mark, to give her some perspective. “And Mom and Dad?” she asks in a choked voice.

Now Bill definitely looks surprised. “They’re fine, too. Dana, are you okay? Do you want to call them?”

She’ll cry if she hears their voices. Scully reaches up to touch her face. Her fingers come away wet. “I’m fine,” she lies.

***

Later, after Bill is gone, she looks for scars in the mirror of the dim, cramped bathroom. Where she was shot in the abdomen. Any signs of her pregnancy with William. Scars from her cancer. Anything to indicate that anything from the past twenty-three years happened. She runs her fingers along the small of her back to check for mosquito bites.

There’s nothing there. She is unmarred, unmarked. Smooth skin, smudged soul. She grips the counter too hard and leaves fingerprints along the white porcelain.

She asks her doctor about her infertility. The doctor looks surprised by the question, but gives her a test. “I’m not sure where you got that idea from,” she tells her, afterwards, “but your ability to have children is perfectly intact, Dana.”

_Emily?_ she thinks desperately. _William?_

She’s not sure how it’s possible, and yet. And yet here she is.

***

Mulder doesn’t allow himself to go see her. He asks the doctor about her, of course, and she tells him Scully is fine. (Which doesn’t exactly reassure him.)

He tries to comprehend something, anything about what has happened. _Is Samantha alive? Was I wrong about the conspiracy? Is any of it real? If I keep digging, will they come after me - or Scully - again?_

There’s no explanation, and yet he thinks he’s found one. _It was a hallucination of some sort,_ he tells himself. _A worst case scenario that you created for yourself when the air was cut off from your brain. You don’t know anything about Dana Scully. You made it all up._

_You have another chance to figure out what happened to Samantha. She may not be dead. All of it… you get another chance._

He wonders if it’s worth it.

***

She’s already convinced herself that none of it happened. The Mulder she knew would jokingly scold her for lack of an open mind, but the Mulder she knew does not exist. It wasn’t real.

_God, did his sister even disappear? Or was that just my explanation of why someone would throw their career away on UFOs?_ It’s hard to remember what’s real and what isn’t, but their talk in the hotel room never happened. The first real bond they ever formed is gone. She remembers his fingers against her back, the way his arms had gingerly come up around her and he’d smiled a little and turned his nose into her hair. She remembers his face when he told her about his sister, remembers telling him _I’m not a part of any agenda_ and meaning it; she’d decided then that she wouldn’t betray him. It all started in Oregon, and ended in Oregon, and started again in Oregon; she’d kissed him in their new motel room, the third time, and it had felt brand new.

She doesn’t even know why her mind would come up with _you’re going to fall in love with your new partner and follow him to the ends of the Earth - no matter the personal consequences to yourself_ as a hallucination when she arrested. Or that the depths of her mind could be so creative. She’s never exactly been a creative person. But she knows that none of it was real. It can’t be real.

God, how is she even supposed to go back to her normal life now? She’s changed so much, moved so far back from the life she’s been thrust into. She wasn’t the same person who walked into Spooky Mulder’s basement hideout. She’d let her life become a rambling of chasing things that don’t exist, and running after a man she doesn’t know. And what is she supposed to do now? Go back to work with him and pretend she isn’t in love with her mind’s reflection of him? Solve cases like she hasn’t convinced herself in some hallucination that monsters exist?

Because of course they don’t, do they? Of course it was never real, of course. And this is her chance to put it all behind her.

***

He goes to see her.

Mulder had almost convinced himself that it was some sort of shared experience, and this is another chance for him and Scully, and they can work through their demons together. But her polite (but detached), wobbly smile as he steps into the hospital room is plenty indication he was wrong. She doesn’t know him. And worst, he doesn’t know her.

(But his breath still catches at the sight of her in a hospital bed.)

“Agent Mulder,” she says (dully, politely, and Mulder pushes the echoes of _Mulder_ or _Fox_ or anything besides this courteous address to the back of his mind). “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” he lies (it’s only fair, she’s done it to him enough). He forces himself to smile back, but it feels like a grimace, a jack-o-lantern grin with guts spilling out. “How about you?”

She won’t meet his eyes. Is she angry at him? “Pretty good, considering the circumstances.” She twists the hem of the blanket in her hands.

Mulder has to stop himself from latching onto her, because he can still feel her blood against his skin, and it’s making his skin crawl, and he has to remind himself: _it didn’t happen, it wasn’t real._ “Listen,” he says. “I’m really sorry about crashing the car like that…”

She looks up in surprise, eyes wide. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “The road was slick. It was raining.”

“Still,” he says. “You could have died, Scully.” He tries to hide his shaking hands.

“But I didn’t, “ she says. “I’m still here, Mulder.”

He’d felt the life drain out of her, so her words don’t have much effect. _It’s not her. It’s not her._

***

_It’s not him. It’s not him._

He’s familiar and painful and he won’t meet her eyes. She tries again. “It’s not your fault, Mulder,” she says. Her Mulder would need reassuring, would blame himself, would push her away… “… but I do want you to know that I’m asking for reassignment.”

So she’ll push away for him, unclench her hands from the side of the swimming pool and sink into deep water. Mulder was her tie to land, but somehow, the water seems safer. (That explains why this feels so much like drowning.)

Mulder looks up immediately at this. His eyes widen slightly, and something like relief spreads over his face. “You are?”

She nods. For a moment, she feels very small. “I… this isn’t the type of work I’m used to. It’s against my ideals, all of them. The scientific possibilities are incredible, but I don’t know how much of a difference I can make in this position, which was my entire reason for joining the Bureau.” She bites her lip, packs the last punch with, “This is your life’s work, Agent Mulder, not mine. I hope you understand.”

It would’ve killed her Mulder to hear her say this, but this isn’t her Mulder. She’s a bother to this Mulder, an annoyance. And besides, she can’t work beside him and ignore her feelings for some shadow of him. It would kill her. She needs this lie. She is cutting off her ties to this illusion, and this lie is her lifeline.

(A small part of her hopes that Mulder will sever it, pull her back like he has so many times.)

Mulder blinks. “Well… that’s understandable. The X-Files isn’t the most conventional unit, and a step down from your credentials.” He smiles blandly. There’s nothing behind it. “I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” she says. “You too. I hope you find the truth.” She flinches a little at the familiar phrase she couldn’t stop from slipping out, but he says nothing to this.

They exchange a few more pleasantries as he looks at the floor and she looks at her hands. Scully asks about the case, and Mulder says he’s going to leave it up to local authorities. “They really didn’t want us here, anyway,” he says, and Scully knows this is not her Mulder, because he would never leave in the middle of a case like this.

This is her chance to start over, she’s told herself. But she has no idea what starting over will entail. She doesn’t care about her career goals anymore, not really - all she’d ever wanted to do was help people, and she’ll keep doing that no matter what. She still wants to be a mother, but she doesn’t want _kids_ as much as she wants the son and daughter that never existed (were never hers) back. And she can’t even think about parenting with anyone else besides Mulder, _being_ with anyone else beside Mulder. He’s been the center of her life for so long that she doesn’t know where to start now. It feels like she is spinning uncontrollably out of orbit, doomed to crash eventually.

Finally, Mulder shrugs and says, “You flying back tomorrow?”

She’s realized; maybe he’ll leave now. “Yes. What about you?”

He nods, rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “Well, I guess I'll… see you.” He chews his lip and says, “Good luck” again before leaving.

Part of her wants to run to him and hug him fiercely, keep him from leaving. She digs her fingernails into her palm as a sharp reminder. _It’s not him. It’s not him._

***

If anything, this is a confirmation that this is not his Scully. She only ever tried to leave twice. The first time, he’d tried to kiss her in a hallway and followed her to Antarctica to save her. The second time, she’d left their house, moved back to DC, became a doctor, like he’d told her to then. But one call from Skinner, and she’d been back, following him all over again. Both times she’d come back. She always came back, no matter how much he’d tried to save her. So this can’t be his Scully, because it was so easy for her to leave.

He’ll miss her, even if he can’t allow himself to. It’s for the best. This way, she won’t be hurt anymore. He can go down the rabbit hole again, if that’s what it takes for Samantha, but he won’t take her. Not this time. He won’t be responsible for her pain, not again. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the near death experiences mulder researches are partially taken from the ones discussed in my religions class, although there’s little fact in them and this isn’t inspired by any true events.

**two.**

They leave the hospital, and get on a plane home. If there was ever any doubts in Mulder’s mind about the authenticity of that hospital, of the idea that the conspirators were inside their heads, that it was all an illusion like what happened during his brain surgery, it’s all gone by this point. The Syndicate wouldn’t have let them leave. Besides, he hasn’t smelled cigarette smoke, and that bastard seemed to show up at every turn in the other place.

He looks in on Billy Miles and Peggy O’Dell before they leave. No change. Of course not. _Billy Miles never became a cop, was never abducted or returned dead, never came back to life, never tried to kill Scully or my son…_

His son doesn’t exist, and every part of Mulder that isn’t teeming with selfish longing is relieved.

He is grateful that he’s been seated far behind Scully on the plane. As long as he doesn’t look up, he can pretend that everything is normal, he’s stuck back in his old house and she may be gone but it’s not the end of the world because the end of the world never came, and Scully drove away from their house and had stirred up a cloud of dust from the road that had stung his eyes even though he hadn’t cried.

_It’s not real. It was never real._

(He knows he should be grateful that it wasn’t, for all the suffering they both endured, but he can’t shake this feeling. He thinks, _it’s like I lost her. It’s like she really did die_.)

(And then he hates himself because anything is better than her death. Anything. Even this halfway existence of his.)

_Who’s to say she didn’t really die, and this elaborate fantasy is my coping mechanism_ , he thinks idly, darkly.

He turns his mind to Samantha. How he will find out what happened to her this time. Even if she is dead, he can’t take the thought of not knowing for sure. He’d never accepted anything less before this happened.

He can almost hear Scully’s voice scolding him, telling him he’s gone down this path one too many times, he’s on dangerous ground, he’s not going to get her back.

_Scully’s not here,_ Mulder thinks furiously. _Not my Scully, anyway._

He’d never really liked it when she’d done that anyway.

(Which is a lie. He’d loved every minute he’d spent with her regardless.)

***

Her parents meet her at the airport and Scully has to hold everything in her back from running up to them and latching on like a little girl. She hasn’t seen her father in so many years. She named her son after him, and she only remembered what he looked like from pictures. Her mother doesn’t cry, but she does repeatedly stroke her hair and cheek in maternal relief. It makes something in Scully’s chest tighten so much that she feels like gasping for breath.

They call her “Dana” and it takes some getting used to. twenty-three years of constant “Scully”s: “Dr. Scully”, “Agent Scully”, a shouted “Scully!” in woods or corn fields, a whispered “Scully…” when she was hurt or dying… Her father calls her “Starbuck”, and she digs her nails into the skin of her palm to keep from sobbing. She almost tells him that she named both her dogs after Moby-Dick characters, and has to remind herself that they never existed, either.

Mulder walks past them with his head down, purposefully not looking at her. She watches his retreating form, unable to tear her eyes away, and feels like calling for him shamelessly. “Who’s that?” her father wants to know.

There is no fitting explanation, none that she wants to give. “My brief partner,” she says in an uncharacteristic noncommitted dismissal.

“Brief?” Her mother is poorly hiding her surprise, and she suddenly remembers calling her mother enthusiastically after receiving the assignment. She’d been excited. (That Dana Scully never would’ve resigned, thought her partner was cute and mysterious and worth sticking it out. She misses her, wants to be her again. She’d had hope for her life then.)

“Yes, I’m requesting reassignment,” she replies, and doesn’t say anything else. She answers questions about her medical conditions and lets her father carry her suitcase even though he might be dying.

She drives herself home in a car she hasn’t seen in years and years, and her hands shake on the steering wheel. The last time she drove was driving to the crime scene; Mulder had been letting her out of either pity or lack of practice after years of not really leaving the house. Pity, she thinks. But, no, because the car crashed on a slick Oregon road and stopped her heart and did things to her head and this isn’t fair. She doesn’t know why her parents met her here but she’s glad they did. She’s missed them.  

It’s been years since she’s seen this apartment, it’s been a couple of weeks. Her hands are still shaking when she unlocks the door; she wonders if it’s a problem worth pursuing. She finds herself checking to see where the window was repaired after Duane Barry, checking for Melissa’s or Pfaster’s bloodstains on the floor, checking for signs of William ever having lived here. (She would’ve thought getting over the son she’d never had would be easiest, she had already lost him once, and what seemed like thousands of times before that, but it was still so hard, another chance or not.)

She calls Melissa and jams a hand in her mouth to keep from crying out when she hears the voice over the phone for the first time since Emily. She cries as soon as she hangs up. Somehow, she’s gotten three members of her family back. She’d been getting used to the fact that she’d never see her mother again. She’s gotten her family back and lost what she’d had left. Everything she’d left behind for him, once.

_She stands in the doorway for a second, bag in hand. She’s leaving everything behind and doesn’t care. She hopes her mother will take some things that still manage to mean something; everything else can rot in evidence lockers as far as she’s concerned._

_“Dana?” John asks, resting his hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”_

_All she can see is blurs of Mulder and William, saying goodbye to them. She’s said goodbye to four of the most important people in her life in this apartment. She never wants to see it again._

_“I’m fine,” she says. “Let’s go.”_

***

She goes to the FBI to meet with Blevins about reassignment. She has to hold in a gasp when she sees Pendrell alive ( _how many people, how many people am I going to have to get used to seeing alive_ ), and sidesteps him so violently that he raises an eyebrow at her. She nearly runs into Skinner, and sees he doesn’t have much recognition for her. Of course, they hadn’t started pissing him off until later in their X Files career. Still, it’s hard not to talk to the man who their relationship had been almost paternal with, at the end. He’d saved them multiple times, and he looks at her now without much recognition before moving on.

She sees Blevins and holds in a _he’s with the conspiracy, you can’t trust him_ because there is no conspiracy, of course. Or maybe there is, but whether there is or there isn’t, it’s none of her business. She’s walking away. She sits across from him and forces a tight smile.

“Agent Scully. I was so sorry to hear about your accident,” Blevins says pleasantly. She hates hates hates him for ruining Mulder, for sending her to do it. “I’m glad you and Agent Mulder made a full recovery.”

A door opens behind him and the smoker steps into the room. Scully sucks in air to hold back a gasp. She wants to kill him.

“I… thank you, sir,” she says awkwardly, trying to focus her attention on Blevins. It doesn’t work. All she can think about is not-Mulder’s dead body on his apartment floor, what it feels like to die, Mulder’s soft voice as he told her what had happened at his hearing, his fingers brushing back her hair and her burning hatred for Them, for Blevins.

“The case was unsolved?” he continues.

“Yes. There was no… explanation as to why those people had died, and with no visible leads at the time of the accident, Agent Mulder found it best to leave when we’d both fully recovered.” It’s a good thing she’d spent almost two months in the other place at the FBI before dying, or otherwise she’d be out of practice.

“I assume we’ll see your report shortly.”

The smoker takes a drag on his cigarette. Scully clears her throat and folds her hands. (Very Professional.) “Actually, sir, I wanted to request reassignment from the X-Files,” she says. Blevins doesn’t say anything, just looks at her. She scrambles for some kind of explanation. “I… don’t believe these cases have any merit, and Agent Mulder is more than capable of handling the office himself. I feel that I could make more of a difference…”

“Agent Scully, do you understand the meaning of an order?”

Her mouth hangs open in surprise for a minute before she manages to compose herself. “Yes - yes, sir,” she stammers.

“We believe you’re the best person for this job. You’ll stay on the X-Files until further notice and submit reports on the cases you work with Agent Mulder,” Blevins says sternly with a sense of finality. The smoker stares solemnly at her, tipping the cigarette away from his mouth.

_I resign._ It’s on the tip of her tongue, but it won’t jar loose.  Nicotine-scented smoke swirls around the room, and she nods. “Understood,” she says.

She almost goes down into the basement out of habit. Even twenty-three years later, it’s still habit. (Step into the elevator, push the “B” button. Go into an office with no desk for her, without her name on the door, and listen to ramblings about monsters. Even when she’d returned, it hadn’t really been her office, still. Maybe everyone, even Mulder, had been waiting for her chance to walk away.) Maybe if she goes in and tells Mulder she can’t resign, it’ll be okay - he’ll smirk and make a joke and pull out some obscure file on homicidal slime or something and it’ll all be normal again, she can just go back…

But she stops as soon as her foot hits the floor outside the elevator, and she turns, telling herself, _it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real._ She wipes away hot tears in the elevator, and tries to expunge the echoes of his voice from her head. 

She sends in a letter of resignation the day after she meets with Blevins. It’s denied. She calls in sick for a straight week. Sooner or later, she reasons, someone will figure out what’s going on. Or maybe she’ll just be fired. That’s the hope, if she’s being honest with herself. She can’t face this, can’t face him. She crawls onto her couch and tries to sleep.

***

The office looks exactly the same as it did twenty-three years ago. Dim, cramped, one desk. (No Scully.) He’ll miss the computer. He flips through the files, scans the book titles on the shelf, rummages through the things he’d left on his desk before he’d left for Oregon: those pictures he’d been working on when she’d come in and ruined his life.

_“Agent Mulder. I’m Dana Scully. I’ve been assigned to work with you,” she says with the young, green eagerness he’d expected._

_“Oh, really? I was under the impression that you weren’t said to spy on me.” He’s determined not to trust her, even if he is impressed by her, even if her hand is softer than he’d expected and she’s definitely smart enough to keep up with him…_

He wonders if they’ll send another spy. If they do, he hopes he can give himself the courtesy of not falling in love with this one.

He wonders if he’ll go to old cases, except without Scully to back him up. (He’ll probably die a few cases in, without the skeptical voice of reason to shoot the bad guys.) Does he have to worry about liver eating mutants and serial killers now? (Is it his courtesy to remember when all these things happen and call up with a tip? Is he some sick kind of prophet, doomed to save a population from all things that go bump in the night? Should he buy a calendar to map out his and Scully’s time investigating, so he’ll remember when to start warning people?) Or did he make it all up? If so, how did he get so goddamn creative? He’d inserted people of the past into his fantasy, twisted them to be darker. Boggs, Roche, Barnett. Phoebe. Fowley. That man who had been around a lot as a kid, always smoking. Funny how his brain had manipulated the smoker into the devil. Was he still trying to comprehend the things that had happened to him, his past traumas? How did that turn into a twenty-three year fantasy on the brink of death?

_If I was going to make up twenty-three years for myself, the least I could’ve done is make them happy._

He pulls a file out of the cabinet for the first time since returning. One on near death experiences. There’s the generic, of course. Light, dead relatives, discussions with entities, compulsive need to do better. And then there’s the negative experiences. A trip to Hell, also inexplicably inspiring people to do better.

Mulder notes some near the back. People who detail an entire other reality, where they experienced pure bliss or pure torture. Written off as a hallucination, like the others, but much too vivid to be nothing.

It’s the best explanation of what happened to him that he can think of. Losing his family, his son, Scully, himself, his life being cast into a spiral of tragedy… he was in some kind of hell. And now he’s back.

He pushes aside the report on the case from Oregon (nothing to report, anyway, the nine minutes was their deaths), and begins a new one.

***

Scully has nightmares.

Sweaty, terrifying nightmares that leave her tangled up in her sheets and arms thrown out over the bed like she’s reaching for someone. (Mulder had slept with her in between the unfamiliar, stiff sheets of her bed after her mother died. She misses his warmth.)

Nightmares aren’t abnormal, not for her, but now she’s having nightmares about a nightmare. She has to remind herself _Tooms isn’t real Pfaster isn’t real Modell isn’t real Schnauz isn’t real Mulder’s okay Mulder’s not real there’s no such thing as aliens._

_Or is there? Was that some sick prophecy? Is this my future?_ The thought sickens her - she misses him but doesn’t want to go through that hell again.

She has nightmares about a son and daughter that never existed. She has nightmares of the shadow of her former partner, a conjuring of her own that she fell in love with.

It’s terrifying to wake up in the setting of half of her nightmares. She forgets, sometimes, what’s happened and is confused about why she’s not in her apartment in the other place. At one point, she wakes from a nightmare about Pfaster and stumbles into the living room with her gun in hand before she remembers

It’s a miserable kind of existence. She almost has a heart attack when Melissa calls and she answers without thinking. She has to remind herself how to use 90s technology. _This is ridiculous,_ she tells herself. _That wasn’t real, either. You need to forget it._ It’s strange and almost annoying to be in a world without modern appliances, a fact Mulder would undoubtedly make fun of her for.

She thinks about what Mulder would do or say too often, and it hurts every damn time.

She misses Mulder at unusual moments. She’d made herself get used to not seeing him before, but she’d always known they could fix it if they wanted. Now they can’t. So she misses him. When she wakes up, when she goes to sleep. When she eats dinner by herself. When she sits and makes herself memorize old phone numbers, even though she still remembers his number from 1993. She sees spaces in her apartment, but she only sees him in them, the way she had when he’d been abducted. It hadn’t happened after she’d left, because she had found a space where he hadn’t been. She feels hollow and she can’t explain it.

They were the definition of a tragic love story, cast against the world, thrown together into a wild sea of darkness that they couldn’t claw their way out of. Scully had wondered before if there was fate involved, or if they’d beaten the odds, gone against what was written in the stars. Either way, their story is being rewritten, and Scully never wanted it to end this way.

***

The office is unfamiliar without Scully lurking around it, and Mulder finds himself missing her at abnormal moments. No one to roll their eyes at his theories, no one to rein him in, keep him from going too far, prove half of his theories, in the end.

No one to spy on him, either.

He doesn’t take any cases for a while. He looks over his sister’s files. He searches for CGB Spender, Alex Krycek, Deep Throat, Marita Covarrubias. He tapes an X to his window, just to see if anything happens. He goes to nearby places where they had found something before. Nothing visible. No leads, no hints of the truth.

For the first time in years, Mulder wonders if there is no truth out there. If his sister really was taken by a serial killer, like Roche had made him believe. It made so much sense before, in his dream or whatever, but now, here in his apparent real life, he’s not sure he wants to give another twenty-three years to this. He’d had a long time to make peace with Samantha’s death before diving headfirst back into the conspiracy. And when he had, it had been about her, but it had been about Scully, too. And William, and his own suffering over this, and saving the world, as Scully had put it, on the porch of the house they’d bought together, the house she had left. None of that existed here. He was just Fox Mulder, with plenty of life left to live, and plenty of time to make up for lost years.

The only thing is that he doesn’t quite know what he’d be making up for.

He’s been avoiding his apartment as much as possible, but fatigue finally drives him home. The damn waterbed is gone, which he wouldn’t actually care about if Scully hadn’t once been in it. There’s no bloodstains in the floorboards or bullet holes in the walls and it feels wrong. He wants their house back.

He falls asleep on the couch and wakes up screaming her name. One of his neighbors hears and comes to check on him; it’s the woman who shot her husband after being drugged by the water supply. It’s too damn hard to be back, where everything and nothing has changed. If someone had bothered to ask what moment he’d go back and fix if he could, he’d have chosen saving his sister. Or Emily. Or William. Or Scully’s sister. Or anything, really, to make her happy, them happy, to fix their broken lives.

He supposes the most rational option would be Scully’s abduction, because it was almost a linchpin, but he never had the choice to make.

***

Scully goes to Skyland Mountain.

She’s traced half of her false life’s greatest tragedies to an abductee who forced her into a trunk, and drove her hours to a mountain where he left the aliens take her, apparently. Or the military. Had they ever figured out exactly who it was? It hadn’t mattered. What followed was a coma, cancer, Emily, William. Her alien DNA. Melissa. She can’t stop wondering what would have happened if Mulder had gotten there in time. He’d told her years later how close he had come, and he hadn’t been able to look at her when he’d said it. How would their life have been twisted in a different direction? Would they have been happy sooner? Or would they have come together at all? Does she owe every happiness in her false life to fucking Duane Barry?

It’s not an explainable urge, but she knows she has to go, so she goes. She blasts the radio to drown out everything buzzing incessantly in her head. It doesn’t work.

***

Mulder goes to Skyland Mountain.

It’s for several reasons, the most plausible being that there were two abductions there, in his dream. But also because he keeps dreaming of when she was taken, the echo of his voice on the answering machine. _Mulder! I need your help!_ The fact that he came so close to being able to save her. If he hadn’t lingered at the car so long, if the tram hadn’t been stalled or if he hadn’t brought fucking Krycek with him in the first place, if he’d let Duane Barry die in that office…

_I could’ve saved her._

It was more than that. The abduction led to her cancer, her children, her alien DNA… if he’d gotten there sooner, he could’ve gotten Barry away from her, left before the ship came. He could’ve held her as she cried into his shirt, the way she had after Pfaster. He could’ve saved them years of pain.

He has to remind himself that it was just a dream, so he goes to Skyland Mountain. But he finds her at the top.

Her car is parked where Barry’s was, and she stands facing away from him, moonlight bouncing off of the vibrancy of her hair, hands balled into fists at her side. For a moment, everything in him is sheer panic ( _whatisshedoinghereamiawake_ ), and he screams her name.

Scully turns to look at him, and her face whitens. “Mulder?” she gasps or mouths or something. He can’t hear her, but she is swallowing back tears and is here and whole and undeniably _his_ Scully.

“What are you doing here?” he calls. It’s the same thing he asked her in a warehouse, weeks after they buried her daughter, before she pressed a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. But that hadn’t been real, either.

_Is this real?_

Her hands are shaking, and he sees her shove them in her pockets. Hiding from him again. This is all too familiar. “I had to see,” she says. “I had to…”

They close the distance between them. Mulder reaches out and pulls her against him, resting his head against the top of hers. Her hair carries the same smell. Somehow, they still fit together, his chin on top of her head. Somehow, it’s like nothing has changed.

“Mulder…” she says into his shirt. She is holding him just as tightly, small hands knotted into the back of his shirt.

“You were dead, Scully.” His voice shakes, and he clutches her tighter. “I watched you die again. _Again_.”

Her voice is muffled, but firm. “That wasn’t real.”

“The suspect,” he says. “You cornered him in an alley. You… you kept approaching suspects alone. You did it in Oregon.”

“The lizard man.”

“Why did you do that,” he says into her hair. “He shot you, Scully. I couldn’t get there in time. He shot you and he ran.”

“Mulder…” She’s shaking her head firmly, nose brushing back and forth against his chest, rigid in his arms.

He should stop but he can’t. He’s holding her as close as he possibly can because he thought he’d never hold her again. “The blood was everywhere, Scully. I couldn’t stop it. I tried to call 911, but they wouldn’t have been able to get there in time. I watched you die, Scully, and then I followed you.”

“Mulder,” she says again, muffled, and she sounds on the verge of tears. He guesses he really will get the chance to hold her on Skyland Mountain while she cries. “That _wasn’t real_.”

“William,” he says.

She pulls away to look up at him. Her eyes are the same, hurt and furious, brimming over. “Excuse me?”

“Our son. William. Do you remember?”

Her voice is breathless. “Do you?”

***

They’d left the mountain. Too many painful memories for either of them to stay. Mulder had driven ahead of her, and he’d stopped checking to make sure she was still there after about an hour of driving. But when he’d gotten to his apartment, she’d been behind him. He hadn’t been sure if she would come, but she had, unfailing. As always.

Now they sit across from each other on his couch, the same couch where they’d sat so many times before. He remembers the movie, her head on his shoulder. The fish tank casts an eerie blue light over everything. He doesn’t even remember the fish’s names, or if they’d had names. But he remembers that Scully fed them when he was gone.

They recap twenty-three years, and Mulder holds himself back from reaching out and grabbing her hand. Scully breathes unevenly as she talks. She sounds too young in the dark.

“I thought I’d made it all up,” she says, voice trembling.

“That’s what I’d thought, too, but I’ve considered it, and I don’t think so, Scully,” he says. “I’ve been reading about near death experiences. There are reported negative near death experiences.”

“Mulder…” she interjects, automatically skeptical.

“What if we…” He almost can’t get the words out. He reaches for her hand, and stops himself again, fingers spread out on the leather. “What if we shared a negative near death experience because we arrested at the same time? What if we were in some kind of… afterlife, some kind of hell?”

There’s a pause. She doesn’t answer.

Mulder reaches for her hand again, and actually takes it this time, fingers sliding together naturally. “Everything we went through, Scully. All of it. That was Hell. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Bruckman,” she says.

“What?”

“Bruckman,” she says again. “The psychic. He told me I wouldn’t die. Fellig, when I was shot. He told me not to look at Death. Nobody dies in Hell. We died, and here we are.”

Mulder closes his eyes. “I did.”

Her hand goes limp in his. “But you came back,” she whispers, terrified. “We always come back.”

Mulder can see her shadowy figure in the blue light from the fishtank. Her head is bowed, hair hiding her face. She is shaking. She speaks again. “Mulder, when I was in my coma…”

It’s his turn to freeze with unearthed terror.

“I remember things that were undoubtedly part of that… reality. My father spoke to me, and my father is still alive here. But I remember something else about that time. I remember standing on a road in Oregon, in the rain, next to a car crash… briefly, but I remember.”

He has a sudden flash of memory. “I was there,” he says. “When I… died. I remember, too.”

Scully rests her head against his shoulder. He doesn’t remember them getting this close. “I’m not sure we’ll ever really know what happened,” she says into the fabric of his shirt. “But. If we remember the same things…”

“Hell or not, it doesn’t matter, I guess,” Mulder says. “I still fell in love with you.”

Scully squeezes his hand, and he remembers the lizard man case again. A hotel room, with animal heads on the walls and a case file strewn across the bed. _Yeah, this is how I like my Mulder,_ she’d said, wearing one of his shirts to sleep in. He hadn’t responded, not then. She’d kissed him later, and they’d never talked about it. But he’d driven her home after her mother died, crawled into bed with her and held her and loved her.

“This is another chance,” she says. She’s moved closer somehow, pressed against him, practically in his lap. “Maybe things will turn out differently this time. Better.”

There is a lot unspoken in this proposition, and for a brief second, Mulder allows himself to imagine it. (He wonders if it’s possible to get back a child that never existed. If this isn’t just another chance for them, but for William, too, somehow.)

“Scully…” He reaches up, absently, to touch her hair, and moves his hand down immediately. “There’s still Samantha. I still don't… really know what happened to her. She could still be alive… I can’t stop looking. I can’t give up on her.”

He’d been bracing himself for her usual chiding, her irritation at him for throwing herself back into it. _You can’t save her, Mulder._ But when she pulls back to look at him, he sees none of that reflected in her eyes. (Somehow, they’re still the brightest things in the room, even in the dusky effect.)

“Mulder,” she says. He still has a hold of her left hand. She reaches with her right and takes his free one. “I told you once that I wouldn’t change a day.” She smiles slightly in the half-light, and there is hope in that smile. _Maybe there’s hope._ “Did you not believe me?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my disclaimer for this chapter is “i watch too many horror movies”. my other disclaimer is that my knowledge of investigations comes from cop shows, so i apologize for any facts i’ve gotten wrong. warning for disappearance and discussion of death/blood.

**three.**

She wakes up with his head against her shoulder and his breath hot against her collarbone, wakes out of a nightmare and fists her hands in the material of his shirt when she remembers, panicked from the still vivid images racing through her head.

She is still trying to process the events that had transpired. (Drive to Skyland Mountain, find Mulder. Follow him home. Hold his hand on a couch and tell him you’ll follow him further. No problem.)

(She’s still not sure how much she believes him on the issue of Hell, but that’s a conversation for later. After all, she doesn’t see what else it could be, if they both remember, are both the same people, have both been missing each other like a phantom limb. She’d forgotten to tell him how much she’s missed him.)

His apartment is startlingly familiar and strange in daylight. His bed is gone, the one they’d spent multiple nights in. All of the fish she’d brought to her apartment before she’d left their lives forever aren’t here; it’s all new ones. Or old ones, whatever. His couch is the same, and that’s probably the only comfort. She sees the memories in flashes: the time she’d almost been shot through the window, Skinner with a gun, her blood on the floorboards, his shirt in her arms on the couch as a poor substitute and her nose buried in the material. She’d brought William here before she’d finally sold the apartment, after it was clear he wasn’t coming back, because she’d wanted him to know his father. He’d been amused by the fish tank, babbling and waving his chubby hands. She blinks back tears at the chest-ache memory of Mulder, then William, being gone, presses her nose into his hair like she had on the Antarctic plains to remind herself that he’s here.

She suddenly wants their house back more than anything, their home with the warm bed and furniture they’d bought together. Does that place even exist? Even if it did, it’d be as run-down as when they’d first bought it. Their house is gone.

Panic is squeezing in Scully’s throat, Mulder’s weight suddenly too heavy in her arms. She has no idea where they go from here, no idea how this works. Same as before? Or should they go ahead and pick up where they left off, move in together and pretend nothing ever changed. Except they can’t, can they, because they both have families now, families who would ask questions. And where would they live? Here or at her apartment? Somewhere new? She doesn’t know if she could stand to be in either place. It’s suddenly too much to be here, even holding Mulder, and she slides out from behind him and heads for the door. She doesn’t leave a note because she has no idea what to say.

***

She reports for work for the first time in weeks, goes to the basement and finds another nameplate on the door. _Agent Dana Scully_. This is the most unfamiliar sight of all, because she wasn’t ever expecting to see that. Not in any universe.

(She feels a slight twinge of guilt at her doubt, but it’s not as if it’s unprompted.)

When she enters the office, she has decided not to mention it. But Mulder immediately looks up from his work, glasses askew on his face, and gives her an apologetic smile that makes her want to kiss him. “There really isn’t room for two desks in here,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Scully involuntarily shakes her head. “No, it's… fine. Really.” She sits in her usual spot by his desk. The poster still hangs on the wall, in its earliest incarnation - they’d had four or five over the years. “Thank you,” she adds, smiling and squeezing his arm gingerly.

Mulder chews his lip, almost nervously. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming back.”

“I’m sorry I left like that,” she says abruptly. “It was just… hard being back there. After… everything.”

Mulder nods. He doesn’t say anything.

“But I’m in,” she adds quickly. “I told you that.” _I love you,_ she thinks. _I’m always in, even if this all takes a little processing._

He nods again. They stare at the desk awkwardly.

“So, where do we start with Samantha?” she says, finally.

He shrugs. “I’m not entirely sure. It’s strange to even think about her being alive, much less starting from scratch.”

“From _scratch_?” Scully says in amazement. It’s been twenty-three damn years, it’s impossible to think of starting from nothing.

“Well, not scratch. Everything I have up to this point in time. I’m still trying to collect it all, remember what I knew for sure at this point. In the meantime, though, we do have a new case,” he says, drumming his fingers against the desktop.

Scully smiles slightly. “Liver eating mutant?”

“No, actually. Disappearance. Mother from a family living out in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of an intrusion, nothing to suggest a kidnapping. The husband says they haven’t been in the area long enough to have any real enemies and can’t think of anyone from the past who would want to hurt them.”

“So, what, you suspect alien abduction?” She gets kind of nervous just mentioning it. How can she tell Mulder that she doesn’t want him investigating something like that, after what happened their second time in Oregon?

He shakes his head. “No evidence of that, either. Her husband didn’t see any strange lights, didn’t hear her get out of bed. He just rolled over and she was gone.”

“So… what do you suspect?”

Mulder smirks. “The house is said to be haunted.”

Scully shakes her head immediately. “Mulder, that’s ridiculous!”

“What do you mean, ridiculous? You’ve seen ghosts before!” he argues.

“That was Hell. It doesn’t count.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence. For a second, Scully thinks she’s said something wrong.

Mulder shrugs. “Well, it’s better than Tooms, at least. Right? Ghosts can’t hurt you.”

“Then what’s your explanation for the victim?”

“She’s not necessarily _hurt,_ Scully _._ The little girl in _Poltergeist_ came out alright, remember?”

Scully rolls her eyes. “ _Come into the light, Carol-Anne?_ Besides, don’t you remember that Christmas we spent in the haunted house?”

“Don’t remind me, Scully.” He smirks at her suddenly. “Besides, I thought it didn’t count.”

She can’t stop the incoming smile. “What evidence do you have of ghosts?” she argues.

“The son saw something,” he says. “He claims the unidentified entity threatened to take his mother.”

She sighs helplessly. “Surely there must be a better explanation.”

He grins like a child. “We’ll never know unless we investigate.“

Scully taps the file on Mulder’s desk. “We leaving tomorrow morning?”

“Nine o’clock flight up to Massachusetts.”

***

There’s a lot of unnerving things about being in an airport in 1993 when you’re used to airports in 2016. Mulder scans the array of people absently. It’s an old habit, years old. He’d sometimes made a game out of looking at people and trying to figure out why they were there. He’d used to try and make Scully join in. She’d never really been very good at it, coming up with answers like, “He’s on a business trip. She’s visiting her parents.” He’d sometimes been able to get a laugh out of her with deliberately elaborate and ridiculous stories.

He’d looked through people at airports - people everywhere, really, but especially airports - for Samantha. Later, he’d looked for his son.

He spots Scully moving towards him through the crowd of people. She smiles tentatively at him as she comes over to join him. “Hi.”

“Hey, Scully.”

She sits beside him, her eyes moving over the crowd briefly. He wonders if she used to search for her son, too.

“Do you have the file?” she asks.

“Sure.” Mulder pulls it out of the outside pocket of his carry-on and passes it to her.

“Thanks. I wanted to take a look at it before we get up there.”

“Already building your case against me?” he teases.

“Why not? I need to have something prepared for your ghostly claims.”

They’re both scanning the crowd at this point. She probably does share his habit of looking for their son, he realizes. He hadn’t noticed on the most recent time they’d flown together, the case in Oregon. They’d driven to Philadelphia, and the other two cases had been in DC. The suicide, and the other one. The one where… before they’d come here. The reason they’re back.

Their plane is called, and they head towards the boarding gate.

***

She shivers when they exit the corresponding Boston airport. The air is biting, wind blowing harshly. Her windblown hair obscures the right side of her face. She brushes it back as she says, “I didn’t think to bring a jacket. DC isn’t usually this bad this time of year.”

He offers her his jacket (which would undoubtedly swallow her in the brown fabric, sleeves obscuring her small hands with only the fingertips visible, the empty edges blowing in the wind), and she declines it. He figured she would. He has the urge to wrap his arm around her and engulf her, be a shield for the wind, but she wouldn’t agree to that either, if he had the courage to ask.

He turns the heat up in their rental car, some small shield against the cold. She scrunches up her shoulders and thanks him. They drive along a lonely road.

“So, even after all that we’ve seen, you still don’t believe in ghosts?” Mulder asks her, casually steering with one hand.

Scully shakes her head firmly. “Everything that happened… there… could’ve been a result of the place. Ghosts aren’t necessarily real.”

“I think they are,” he says, somewhat stubbornly. It isn’t just the desire to believe that his poster proclaims, it’s the ones he’s seen - Samantha, the Gunmen, even goddamn Krycek. He can’t dismiss it so quickly, Hell or whatever or not.

Scully moves her hands closer to the vent. “I saw you,” she whispers.

He’s confused by this statement. “What?”

“In February, 2001, before we… found you.” She won’t look at him. “I saw you, your…”

“Oh.” He grips the wheel a little tighter. She rarely discusses that event. It’s an unspoken taboo, like their son.

“It wasn’t very eventful. I looked away and you were gone.” She turns to look at him. “You don’t remember?”

He doesn’t remember much of anything about his death in the other place besides that rainy road in Oregon, where he’d been the entire time anyway. This situation gets harder and harder to deal with the more he puts things into contact. “No,” he says. But it makes sense, though, that he would come to her. She’d been all he had left at that point.

He senses that there is more to her relationship with ghosts that she is not telling him, but he won’t push. He stops at a store and buys her a gray windbreaker. It doesn’t go with her suit, but she shrugs it on anyway, and doesn’t meet his eyes when she thanks him.

***

Robert Oswald is the picture of a panicked husband, distracting his two kids with Popsicles before coming to talk to the FBI agents in the kitchen. It’s a face Scully’s seen too often on herself. Usually, she’s pretty detached to this type of situation, but it’s harder in the wake of everything.

“Can you think of any reason why your wife would like to leave?” she asks.

Robert is already shaking his head. “Winnie wouldn’t leave like that. Not the kids.”

“Sometimes people have things going on that their spouses don’t know about,” Scully says gently. She can feel Mulder’s eyes on her. “We need to consider the possibility…”

“If she’d left, someone would have noticed,” Robert says in a firm counterpart. “She was right next to me, for Christ’s sake! Molly or Ben would’ve noticed her leaving, or _something_.”

“Okay,” Mulder jumps in. “We’re just reviewing all the possibilities. Do you think your wife was abducted by someone?”

“I can’t think of anyone who would have a motive, or any situation that I wouldn’t have noticed. This may sound silly, but I researched alien abductions… I thought it was a possibility… but usually there’s some kind of lights or sounds or something in reported cases, I think, and I didn’t hear anything like that.”

Mulder’s eyes light up at this statement. Scully’s tempted to roll her eyes, but she understands why this could be an asset - if he’s open to paranormal explanations, he’s more likely to take Mulder’s ideas seriously. “Our department handles paranormal phenomena,” he says. “You’re right, this situation doesn’t suggest alien abduction, but it does suggest the unexplained.”

The son, Ben, rounds the corner of the kitchen counter, his mouth stained purple. He tugs on his father’s sleeve until he has his attention. “I told you, Daddy,” he says solemnly. “The spirit took Mommy.”

Mulder crouches in front of the boy. “Why do you say that, Ben?” he asks seriously, and Scully’s suddenly reminded of him as a father. She hates her treacherous brain for it.

“Mommy told me,” he says. “She came to my room with the spirit.”

“Ben, why didn’t you tell me?” Robert cuts in, but Scully stops him by holding out her hand, giving him a look saying that this is important. They watch the two of them together, the FBI agent and the seven-year-old.

“What did she say to you?”

“Mommy told me she’d be back,” Ben informs them gravely. “We have to wait for her.”

Mulder raises his eyebrows in excitement. “Did she seem… scared or anything?”

He shrugs. “Maybe a little. I dunno. But we have to wait for her. Like she said.”

***

Mulder and Mr. Oswald manage to come to an agreement where they’ll stay at the house overnight and watch for any supernatural events, something the stereotypical Fed-hating local authorities are more than glad to let them do while they work the “sensible” side of the case. The three remaining family members leave for the hotel rooms paid for by the Bureau in hopes of avoiding another disappearance. “It’s the perfect arrangement,” he tells Scully later.

She raises an eyebrow. “Speak for yourself. I still fail to see how this is going to help us find Winnie Oswald.”

“Come on, Scully, even _you_ have to admit that this is an unexplainable occurrence. Any other explanation you have for her disappearance is countered by the fact that nobody heard her.”

“They could’ve been sleeping heavily,” she says stubbornly. “Or there could’ve been some kind of hallucinogen in the house…”

“What, like the mushroom spores in North Carolina?”

“Maybe. Mrs. Oswald prepared dinner that night. If she’d had a reason to want to leave her family, she could’ve drugged them so they’d stay asleep while she left…”

Mulder is smirking at her. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t she leave from work instead of from her house, in the middle of the night? If she were to drug her family, why use a hallucinatory drug instead of a sleeping stimuli? And why does Mr. Oswald insist he was awake when his wife _silently_ disappeared?”

“Ben’s claims of spirits…”

“I think you’re too afraid to admit the obvious about this case, that spirits are the best explanation.”

“Ghosts are _not_ the best explanation,” Scully says irritably.

“Maybe not.” Mulder’s already halfway to the door.

“Where are you going?” she demands.

“To town to do some research on the history of the house.” He pauses. “Someone should probably stay here and watch the house,” he adds apologetically.

It feels like a ditch, but a ditch would usually consist of not telling her, so she agrees. She is still trying to figure out how this works.

The house is an entirely new creature without someone else in it. It’s a drafty old manor, exactly how she’d picture a haunted house. Like the one at Christmas. She trips over a toy truck and shivers at the sight of it. It seems miserably fitting to them, this case.

Scully rounds a corner and sees a woman. A woman who matches the picture of Winnie Oswald that had been in the casefile, a woman dressed in flannel drawstring pants and a t-shirt. She looks worried.

“Mrs. Oswald?” Scully says, stunned. “I’m a federal agent. Are you alright?”

She shakes her head.

A loud sound down the hall draws her attention, and when she looks back, the woman is gone. “Mrs. Oswald?” Scully calls.

No answer.

She draws her gun and runs in the direction of the noise. It’s the slow eerie, mechanized creaking of floorboards as an empty rocking chair rocks back and forth .

***

“So no Winnie Oswald?” Mulder raises an eyebrow.

“I searched the entire house from top to bottom, and nothing.” Scully looks a little irritated at her own words. They’re slouched at the ancient kitchen table, casefile strewn over the top and takeout Mulder had brought back clustered together on one side.

“Any more paranormal activity?”

“Some noises. It could’ve been the house settling,” she says stubbornly.

“Fine, but how do you explain the rocking chair?”

“You want to know my theory, Mulder? Winnie Oswald has faked her own disappearance, and she is building a paranormal case so as not to implicate herself. She rigged the rocking chair and ran off when I looked away.”

“But you would’ve heard her run away, unless you’re banking off of the case we solved back in 2000. Remember those teens and how fast they could move? Did you find any wires near the rocking chair?” Mulder presses.

“It could have been mechanized for all we know, Mulder,” she protests. “Custom made, remote controlled.”

“Whatever theory you have is fine and well, Scully, but you can’t deny this.” He slides several scribbly sheets of notebook paper across the table.

She huffs with frustration, tipping her head to the side. “Your handwriting is indecipherable, Mulder.”

He taps the paper with his index finger. “1819, a young married couple moves into their newly built house. By 1820, both the husband and their baby were dead from a strain of influenza.” Scully swallows, resting her chin in her hands like a little kid. He curses himself for not noticing the similarities, but plunges. “The new widow went mad, or so the local historian says, locked herself in the house and refused to see anyone. However, her family visited for Christmas despite her protests.”

“I have a feeling this will not end well,” Scully mutters.

“A distant family member finally came to investigate when no one had left the house midway through January, and found the woman dead in the rocking chair. She’d written _I want to be alone_ in what looked like her own blood below the chair.”

“The same chair I saw?”

“I’m not sure. But the family members were never found - not in the house or on the grounds.” Mulder taps several other bullet points with his finger. “There have been three more disappearances since - of a child in 1874, a playwright in 1929, and now this. Winnie Oswald.”

“Every time someone new moved to the house?”

“No, not every time. There were two families that left shortly after moving in - one in 1897, and one in 1945. Reportedly, the second family claimed suspicious activity as the reason for their leaving.” He taps the paper three times. “Every time there was a disappearance, though, no bodies were ever found.”

“So your theory is… the spirit of the widow is taking these people to make sure she stays alone?”

He shrugs.

Scully rolls her eyes. “That is utterly ridiculous, Mulder.”

“Hey, now. Don’t speak ill of the dead.” He motion to the empty space above his head, like an angry ghost is hovering above him. “Besides. You’ve heard the stories of vengeful spirits who want people off of their property,” he offers up. “Remember when we rented _The Conjuring_? You went on and on about how improbable the entire thing was. It’s impossible to watch a movie with you.”

She glares a little, leaning in closer. “Mulder,” she says quietly, “not only was that a movie, but it’s a movie that _doesn’t exist_.”

“But it is a true story, to a point. I read about it. Those same people who investigated Amityville worked on it, in the 70s. Besides that, there are other examples of this purported phenomena. It seems like the mostly likely example to me.”

“But most of the time, spirits kill people by possessing them and causing them to do it to themselves,” Scully points out. “In the movies.”

Mulder grins. “Yeah, but that’s the movies, Scully. This is real life.”

She bites back a smile and tries to look annoyed. “It won’t look good on paper.”

“Do our reports ever look good on paper?” he teases. Her hand rests at the halfway mark of the table, and he resists the urge to slide their fingers together seamlessly.

“Mulder…” Scully says, serious now. “In this… theory of yours, what happens to Winnie Oswald?”

He looks down at the table, picking at the corner of a placement - _Happy Spring!_ , in crayoned child writing and captioned by a family of stick figures in a field of green scribbles. “I don’t know. I think… I _hope_ … she’s alive. I don’t think you would’ve seen her if it was too late.”

“I’m not following, Mulder,” Scully says. “You’re saying that seeing Winnie’s _ghost_ is a sign that she’s still _alive_?”

“I don’t think that was her ghost. I think she’s dying, and her essence is appearing in an attempt to get help.”

Scully chews her lip solemnly, finally saying, “So do you think she’s in the house somewhere? The actual Winnie, not her… essence?”

He shrugs. “It’s possible.”

They check every inch of the house, every hiding place and dent or sconce on the wall that could potentially reveal a hiding place. It takes almost two hours, and at the end, they still have nothing. Scully leans against the wall in her frustration and fatigue, ponytail swinging as she says, “I don’t know if it’s safe to sleep, Mulder. According to your theory, we could end up dead. And mine isn’t much better… if Mrs. Oswald is somewhere on the grounds…”

“We’ll take shifts,” he says. There is only one guest bed, and they have an unspoken agreement to not sleep in any of the Oswalds’ beds. So they will share, so they can watch each other while they sleep. And inexplicably manage not to talk about it. Like that time in Kroner. He could offer to sleep on the couch, but he doesn’t want to.

They work for a while, papers spread out over the bedspread as they discuss theories. “This is pretty unconventional, you know,” Scully says at one point. “Staying at a crime scene.”

“It’s like a comfortable stakeout.” Mulder waves his hand dismissively. “Besides, we’re not a conventional unit, ergo we don’t use conventional methods.”

“Of course,” Scully teases, nudging his side. She smiles, and something in his chest loosens.

An hour later, his eyelids are drooping and the words are blurring on the page. He yawns and tries to hide it.

“You know,” Scully says, glasses sliding down her nose as she studies the file. “We should try the… traditional approach to an abduction and try and make contact with the abductor. See what the… spirits want.” Her tone is strained, like she hates to say it out loud. “Like a séance? Does that sound like a logical approach? Mulder?”

Her voice is almost hypnotic. He turns his head into the pillows, eyes shut. “Uh-huh. Makes sense, Scully.”

“Mulder?” Her hand is on his cheek. “Are you asleep?”

“Mmhmm.” Her touch is soothing, and he leans into it with sleepiness.

***

There is a warm breath against his shoulder, and when he moves his head, he is tickled by hair. They are both still on the bed when he awakes. Except he is fairly sure there was some more space between them originally, and he was in a more upright position.

He’d fallen asleep first, because he doesn’t remember her falling asleep. Which means that she undoubtedly moved closer to him during the night. If he were still in high school, he would be beside himself with _what does this mean?_ But he doubts that many high schoolers have ever been in his unique-type situation.

_Shit, we both fell asleep,_ he realizes, and sits up a little bit to scan the room. Scully manages to remain slumped against him, even with his rapid movement. Nothing seems askew; they are both still here and alive. Mulder sighs with relief, and although he knows it’s childish, reaches down to take Scully’s hand, in case his theory is correct.

Her weight is warm against him, hair obscuring her face as she sleeps. Years ago, this would’ve been normal, them in bed together, but now…

_“Are you going to be okay?” he whispers, smoothing hair off of her forehead. He’d insisted on driving her home after Philadelphia, insisted she needed to rest. She’d cried on the way home and tried to hide it, tears glinting in the headlights of oncoming traffic._

_She grabs his wrist firmly, and tugs him closer. “Stay.”_

_He wants to more than anything. “Are you sure?”_

_“Mulder, please,” she whispers, tear choking her voice. He slides in next to her and lets her bury her face in his neck._

The phone downstairs rings, startling them both. Scully wakes slowly, muttering, “Mulder? Did I fall asleep?” Her nose brushes his neck as she lifts her head to look at him.

“I’ll be right back, Scully,” he says, sliding gently out from under her and jogging out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He gets to the phone and answers it just before it clicks over to the answering machine. “Hello?”

“Agent Mulder?” says Ben Oswald on the other end.

Scully comes down the staircase, tying the strings of a robe - incidentally the same robe she’d worn that night in the hotel room, the one that never actually happened - and shooting him a questioning look. “Ben?” Mulder asks. “What is it?”

“I had a dream about Mommy,” he says seriously. “She told me she had four days, and three are already gone.”

“Four days? Four days until what, Ben?” Mulder has a sinking suspicion of _what_ , but he’s hoping he’s wrong. Ben hangs up abruptly.

“Mulder, what’s going on?” Scully asks, her face a mask of sleepy confusion.

A loud, shattering sound comes from the kitchen. They look at each other for only a second before running towards the noise. A large yellow bowl lies in shards on the tiled floor. Above their heads, the space on the shelf it used to occupy is empty.

***

“So, nothing?” Robert demands. Scully’s driven to town to meet the Oswalds while Mulder stays back to watch the house. It makes her nervous, him being there alone, and she wants to get back as soon as possible.

“We’ve searched the entire house, Mr. Oswald, and there’s no conclusive sign of what happened to your wife. Outside of some… suspicious activity.” She fiddles with her napkin, unsure if she should say more.

The little girl, Molly, looks up from her mutilated pancakes that she’s been methodically cutting ever since they sat down. “Did you see the lady?”

Scully blinks. “What lady?” Surely she’d refer to Winnie as her mother.

“No one can see her but me,” Molly says solemnly. “She told me. She said that we’d better leave, or we’d be sorry. But Daddy and Mommy didn’t believe me.”

Robert looks almost guilty at his daughter’s words. “The real estate agent didn’t tell us the house’s history,” he says. “It was at a decent price because it was a fixer-upper… we loved it. But Winnie was crazy superstitious. I never would’ve bought the house if I’d known what the locals say about it, no matter how nice it was.”

“I think Molly’s lady took Mommy because we didn’t leave like she said to,” Ben says through a mouthful of biscuit and jelly, his pronouncement eerie as it is garbled.

As unlikely as it seems, Scully’s beginning to believe that’s the only option that makes sense here.

***

“So you believe me?” Mulder asks with delight as they set up a Ouija board at the kitchen table.

“I… I don’t know, Mulder. Nothing about this case makes sense…” She sighs. “But your methods have worked in the past.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he says, dropping into the seat across from her. “Although I have no idea what to do if this doesn’t work. If we can’t find her, then there’s no way to save her before the four days are up.”

“In a traditional investigation, I wouldn’t agree to this, but I’m honestly stumped, Mulder. I have no idea what to do.” She gives the board a look of disgust. “And I have no idea how to play this game.”

“I thought you did séances in high school,” he teases, guiding her fingers to the planchette.

“Not only was that a million years ago, but it was mostly an excuse to hold hands and scare each other.”

“Scully, you just called yourself old.” He smirks at her, and she ducks her head to hide her smile.

He places two fingers across from hers on the planchette, their fingertips barely touching. “If there is a spirit here, please make yourself known,” he says, managing to sound totally serious, a feat Scully would’ve found impossible five minutes ago.

They wait, long enough that she is ready to suggest he either ask another question or give up. But the planchette suddenly jerks beneath their fingers, almost throwing her off as it moves to the G. “Are you doing this, Mulder?” she whispers, panicked. It’s a strange sensation.

He shakes his head, looking a little more than fascinated at the movement.

She mentally notes letters in her head until the planchette stops finally, on T. “Get out?” she says out loud. How very _Amityville Horror_ cliche of this ghost. Mulder is a little pale, looking at her earnestly and worriedly.

The board suddenly hurls itself across the room, wrenching their wrists back and away in a painful motion, and hits the opposite wall. The planchette skitters across the floor.

“Well,” Mulder says, unable to hide the nervous-excited hitch in his voice. “That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”

***

At a loss to do anything else, they call in the local authorities. “We’ve got nothing,” the sheriff tells them. “No ransom calls, no contact to any other family members. And with the lack of evidence at the crime scene, there’s nothing to suggest an abduction.” He scratches his head, staring at Mulder a little. “Do you really think there’s a supernatural explanation to all this?”

“It seems to be the only thing making sense,” he says.

Scully offers up her theory (considerably weak, at this stage of the investigation) as a counterpart. The sheriff has his men search the grounds and the surrounding woods. Nothing. No sign of Winnie Oswald or of her manipulating the house. Eventually, they leave Mulder and Scully alone at the house.

“I don’t think we should be sleeping in here,” Mulder says at some point during dinner. “I don’t know if it’s safe.”

At a loss for anything else to do, they get into their traditional stakeout method, car parked in front of the house. They intend to watch the house for any sign of paranormal activity, but Scully is asleep thirty minutes in, head lolling against his shoulder in a way that reminds him of 1997 and phone booths and gunpowder in a hospital room.

***

Scully is in the attic of the house, surrounded by old trunks and baby toys. In the corner stands Winnie Oswald, in the same clothes she’d been wearing before. Assumedly the ones she’d disappeared in.

“Winnie,” Scully says. “Winnie, what’s going on? Where are you?”

“I’m here, in the attic. Behind the wall.”

“Can you get out?”

She shakes her head. “I told my son I’d be back,” she says. “But they won’t let me come back. I think I’m dying. You have to help me, you have to get me out.”

Scully reaches out to touch the other woman’s wrist. Her skin is ice cold. “You’re in the attic?” she says softly. Winnie nods. “I’m coming.”

She wakes with a start on the floor of the attic. She twists on the creaky floorboards, absolutely no idea how she got here. Wasn’t she in the car? “Shit,” she mutters, scrambling to her feet and going to the window. The car is still parked on the front lawn and she can still see Mulder in it.

She turns to the wall she saw Winnie Oswald standing at, and begins to run her hands over it. Might as well get her out while she can.

Just as her hands slide into a dent in the boards, she suddenly smells something  the overwhelming, choking stench of smoke. “ _Fuck_ ,” she hisses, and works faster, hopes her hunch isn’t wrong.

***

Mulder’s in the kitchen of the house. A woman sits at the kitchen table, dressed in period clothes. Blood is dried down her front. “I just wanted to be alone,” she says mournfully. “Why won’t anyone listen?”

He sits at the table across from her, trying to remember her name. Agatha? Agatha something… “Agatha, you don’t have to kill Winnie Oswald,” he says.

“Yes, I do,” the woman says petulantly. Childishly. He supposes he understands, in a wayward way - he’d lost everyone, too. “She wouldn’t leave. Two other families left when I told them to. They were smart. She wasn’t. And neither were you and your wife.”

“She’s not my…” Mulder stops, figuring he probably has better things to do then to argue with a ghost in what is probably a dream. “Well, we’re outside now,” he counters. “And we’d be glad to leave. We will leave, as soon as you give Winnie Oswald back.”

Agatha smiles sadly. “It’s too late,” she says, motioning to puddles on the wooden floor.

Mulder cranes his neck. “Is that gasoline? Agatha, what are you doing?”

“I need to be alone. No one else can come here.” She strikes a match and drops it to the floor.

He wakes with a start, knee jammed up under the dashboard. He’s horrified to see smoke pouring out of a downstairs window of the house. “Scully!” he hisses frantically. “Scully, the house is on fire!” No answer. He turns, expecting to find her sleeping, but instead he finds only an empty seat.

“Scully?” he gasps in horror. Either she went in or the ghosts took her, but she is in that house either way.

He scrambles out of the car and across the dewy lawn up to the porch. The heat is stronger closer to the house, and all of his animal instincts are telling him to run away. He goes in, shoving the door open with the palm of his hand. “Scully!” he shouts as the door slams shut behind him.

No answer. The hallway is relatively untouched, and she isn’t in the living room, but the rooms on the left side of the house are all ablaze.

He scales the stairs. “Scully?” he shouts, heat at his front and back and all around him. Goddamn fire. “ _Scully_!”

“Mulder?”

She’s dragging an unconscious Winnie Oswald by the ankles. Relief floods through him at the sight. “She’s still alive,” she grunts, voice hindered by the smoke and effort, breaking off into a coughing fit. “Help me.”

He scoops up the woman in a fireman’s carry. “You okay, Scully?” He wants to grab her hand but can’t let go of Winnie Oswald. And the place is falling apart around them.

She offers him a brief but reassuring smile. “I’m okay. But we need to get out of here. Smoke inhalation.”

She grips his elbow as they wave their way down the stairs and through the burning hallways of the house, both of them coughing incessantly. She knocks down the heavy wooden door, wincing as her shoulder makes rough contact, and the two of them stumble out into the fresh air and off of the porch. Mulder sets Winnie down on the grass, and Scully bends over her, hands to her pulse. “Call an ambulance, Mulder,” she says.

“There won’t be any more deaths,” he remarks as he pulls out his phone, jabbing his thumb at the illuminated house.

Her eyes are dark-bright in the combination of dark and firelight. “Thank goodness for small favors, I suppose.” She presses her fingers to Winnie’s pulse point. “I found her in a compartment in the wall, with several other bodies. The other victims, I assume.”

The smoke stings his eyes as he hangs up the phone. He kneels beside Scully and buries his nose in her hair. It smells like ashes. “You’ve got to stop approaching suspects alone, Scully,” he says through his burning, teary eyes and roughened throat.

She doesn’t say anything, turns briefly to kiss his cheek.

They are all taken to the hospital, Mulder and Scully because of the smoke inhalation. They can’t talk because of the oxygen masks, but she holds his hand in the ambulance, fingers rubbing rhythmically over his knuckles, and it feels like a benediction.

“I didn’t go in the house by choice,” she says to him later, in their hospital room. “I woke up inside. I don’t know why, but Winnie told me where to find her. When I was asleep. So I stayed to look.” She looks embarrassed. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

He swallows, painfully through his smoke-sore throat, and rasps, “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She smiles, and it’s a small one, but it’s healing. “We’re both okay,” she says. “We saved a mother tonight. That’s what’s important.”

***

Blevins flips through her file with one finger, gingerly, like he doesn’t want to touch it for more than a few seconds. “And this is an accurate portrayal of events?”

“Yes, sir,” she says. She’d left out the part about her dreams and waking up in the house, said that they’d went in together. But everything else is there.

“And you have no idea who set the fire?”

“No, sir,” she says. “Although Agent Mulder’s beliefs are outlined in this report.”

“I see.” Blevins flips the file closed, fingers pressed authoritatively on the manila top. _Case closed_ , she thinks absurdly. “Agent Scully,” he says, almost gently. “You know you’re on our side, don’t you? Not his.”

_You bastards have no idea._ She nods, throat too dry to answer.

“We need to decide what to do with Agent Mulder, and I need you to know that you’re essential in that. His ideas are too farfetched, dangerous. Surely you understand that after working on two cases with him.”

“Yes, sir,” she lies.

“He is manipulative. Don’t let him sway you to his ideals about the government, or his ideas about the unexplained.” Blevins leans closer. “And don’t hesitate to tell us everything you think is relative about Agent Mulder. Even things outside of the workplace. Everything you can get.”

His tone is all wrong, too kindly for what he is saying. They want her to ruin a man - a man that, from their perspective, she barely knows. “Yes, sir,” she says almost robotically, feeling dizzy, head spinning.

***

Mulder shows up at her doorstep the evening after her meeting with Blevins. “I’m sorry, Scully,” he says sheepishly. “It’s…”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she says. “Tooms?”

He nods, and she steps aside wordlessly to let him in. “I just didn’t want to risk it,” he says quietly.

Scully is considering all the times that this will happen in coming years if he doesn’t want to risk things. But then again, she’s not sure she wants to risk it, either, is sure she’ll become protective of Mulder at certain points in time. And besides, she enjoys his company, even as she is confused by it. “Make yourself at home,” she says in what she hopes is an understanding tone. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, um, I’m fine.” His eyes are moving distractedly over the apartment, and she can’t pick out what he’s remembering. Then they land on the bathroom and she shivers, suddenly wanting to board up the air vents.

_“You alright?” Mulder asks, focused on Tooms. She nods, tempted to snap at him that she has it under control, he doesn’t need to act macho and protective. She is still an FBI agent. “He’s not going to get his quota this year,” he adds determinedly. It’s probably supposed to be comforting, but it’s not._

_She scuttles backwards along the bathroom tiles, scrambling to her feet and not taking her eyes off Tooms. “I’ll call for backup,” she says, jaw clenched to keep her chin from trembling. She’ll be alright in a minute, she is not going to break down in front of her new partner, for God’s sake…_

_“Your phone lines are cut. Here, use mine.” He removes one hand from his gun barrel to pull out his cell phone and hand it to her, never taking his eyes off of Tooms. She would hate to get in a staring contest with him - which is a ridiculously absurd thought, but apparently that’s all she can come up with in this moment of panic._

_She takes the phone from him, chilled fingers brushing his warm palm. “Thanks,” she says. Alternately for the phone or for saving her life._

_“Anytime, Scully.”_

“You don’t really think he’s real, do you?” she asks Mulder.

His eyes flick back to her, soft in their gaze. “I don’t know, Scully,” he replies. “I’m not sure I want to find out.”

She remembers Tooms’ aggressive touch on her wrists, her abdomen, and shivers, saying, “Me, either.”

She sits on the couch wearily. After a moment, Mulder comes to sit beside her in silence. “How’d your meeting with Blevins go?” he asks finally.

“Mulder, he wants me to spy on you.”

Mulder laughs without any humor. “We know that, Scully.”

“No, he really wants me to spy on you. He’s… emphasizing it this time, almost. He wouldn’t let me resign or have another assignment. He…” She pauses, not wanting to say _he scared me_. “I’m scared for you, Mulder. You remember how it was last time, where they essentially left me alone and my reports eventually stopped and they never said anything. And it was still hell for your work, your quest. Imagine how much worse it could be this time, if they’re actively working against you through me.”

Mulder doesn’t respond right away. He chews his lip, seemingly deep in thought. “I don’t think you’re looking at it the right way,” he says finally. “I think this could be an advantage for us. If you pretend to be on their side, if they trust you…”

“Then I could know their plans ahead of time,” Scully says, understanding. Maybe she could even find out where Samantha is.

“Yeah.” His gaze is somewhere between earnest and apologetic. “I don’t want to put you in danger, Scully, but…”

“No, you’re right,” she says immediately. “It would definitely give us an advantage if they think I’m an ally. I wish I’d thought of it in… the other place.”

Mulder grins. “But you didn’t know if you believed me yet, then,” he teases.

She’d believed him that _something_ was going on ever since she’d seen his pale, drawn face appearing outside Ellens Air Force Base, had realized that whoever it was had taken him and he didn’t remember a thing of it. “I wouldn’t say that,” she teases back, uneasily, but his smile eases up some of the tension. She wants to fall back into their rhythm, wants to be that way again. She feels like they’re getting there, slowly but surely.

They watch the door in silence. At some point, her head falls against his shoulder and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, tugging her closer. Neither of them mention it out loud.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my disclaimer for this chapter is “i hope i didn’t fuck up beyond the sea”. 
> 
> warning for discussion of death/references to death of a parent

**four.**

She calls him the night her father died in the other place, right after her parents leave. She steps into her living room, and sees the tree, the couch where she’d slept, and the chair her father had been sitting in, and Scully knows she won’t be able to make it through the night alone. So she calls Mulder and he says he can be over in twenty minutes. There is none of the stinted awkwardness that there would’ve been had she called him the first time around. It’s somewhat comforting to know that there are fewer barriers between them, less lines they’re unable to cross. They know each other too well now.

He shows up in twenty minutes flat, as promised. “Thank you,” she says, stepping aside to let him in. “It’s just that I…”

“I know. I understand, Scully.” He must understand. He’d come to her after his father died.

They sit side by side on her couch, flickering lights of the T.V. casting strange shadows over his face. Here in the darkness, she finally tells him what she’d been afraid to tell him years before. “I saw him,” she says. Her hands are cold. She slides them into the spaces between the couch cushions. “That night. Tonight. Right before Mom called to tell me. I saw him sitting right there, in the chair. I think he was trying to tell me something, but I looked away and he was gone.” It was the first time that had happened to her, but it wouldn’t be the last. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you.”

Mulder moves his hand so that it rests against her wrist. “Is that why you believed Boggs, before?” he asks. “Because you saw your father? Because he was trying to tell you something?”

She clenches her hands at her scalp. “I don’t know,” she says.

“How did tonight go? The same as last time?”

“Relatively. The two events weren’t identical, if that’s what you mean.” Her father avoided the subject of her work, and she didn’t even care. Then, all she wanted was his pride; now, all she wants is him, alive. Maybe she can make him proud one day.

Her scalp aches, so she untwists her fingers from her hair and lowers her hands to her side. He slips his hand in hers, tentatively, and she squeezes his fingers gratefully. “I don’t want him to leave,” she says huskily. “I know it’s selfish, but now that I have him back, I don’t ever want him to go.”

“It’s not selfish, Scully,” he says, squeezing back. “I feel the same way about my family, even after everything that happened.”

She turns and kisses him in the space below his chin, and he draws her closer with an arm around her shoulders.

They watch the clock in the corner in silence. When it hits 1:47, Scully turns her head against his shoulder and whispers, “Please could you get the phone if it rings I can’t do it.” He doesn’t argue this point, only agrees in a low voice. _It’s only fair,_ she thinks numbly. _After all, I autopsied his mother._

The phone doesn’t ring. They fall asleep on her couch at 2:45.

***

_There’s the run-together of her mom’s tears soaking her shoulder and her sister’s drawn face, the image of her father’s specter imprinted behind her eyelids. She’d tried calling Ellen, but Ellen hadn’t picked up - she was having Christmas with her family, of course. She calls Mulder, hands trembling, and when he picks up, she just says, “My dad’s dead”, and she’d planned on telling him what she saw, like maybe he’d been able to make it better, but she can’t find the words, lodged somewhere deep in her throat, and he just says, “I’m so sorry, Scully” with enough tenderness to make her want to cry because Mulder is never that tender with her - like maybe if he is it’ll penetrate her armor - and she bites her lip so hard she tastes blood, and her father is dead._

“Scully,” Mulder whispers, hand brushing her forehead, and it takes her a minute to remember what year it is. It is the last leg of 1993, and they are not in the other place, they are here.

“Mulder, is my dad…” she whispers, heart still thundering in her chest.

“The phone hasn’t rang,” he says quickly. “It’s okay.”

She hugs him tightly, burying her face in his shoulder in relief. He’s practically rocking her, and for once she doesn’t mind. “It’s okay,” he repeats soothingly in her ear. “It’s okay.”

They will do this four more times, she realizes with horror. His father, Melissa, his mother, her mother. She doesn’t know if she can take it, this horrible panic.

The phone rings, and Scully suddenly feels a little dizzy. Mulder looks at her questioningly, and she nods numbly, hands too stiff by her sides to move. He picks up the phone gingerly, says, “Hello?”

She can hear the muffled “Who is this?” from her mother on the other end, and grabs the phone from Mulder’s hand. “Hi, Mom,” she says quickly. “That was just Mulder. He came by to work on something with me.”

“Your partner?” her mother asks, astonished. “The day after Christmas?”

“Yes,” Scully says, pulling at the plastic phone cord with an unconscious nervousness. “I was in the kitchen making coffee, and he answered the phone for me,” she adds as an explanation.

Her mother is silent on the other end for a minute before saying, “We just realized that I left my coat at your house last night. Would you mind if we dropped by and got it?”

_We,_ she thinks. “Of course not. Come on over.”

“You’re not too busy?” her mother asks in an innocent tone.

She wants to roll her eyes. Everything seems a little more okay now, in this ridiculous conversation with her mother about her partner. “No, Mom, we’re just working. Come on over.”

Mulder is chewing his lip almost anxiously when she hangs up the phone. “I can go if you…” he starts.

“No, stay. They’d love to meet you.” Her head is still spinning, still reeling from her dream, and she wants Mulder to meet her father. They’d never gotten the chance last time, and as bizarre as it sounds to her, she feels like everything will solidify if they meet. That her father will be officially Not Dead - at least in her mind.

***

Mulder meets Scully’s father for the first time and Maggie for the second time by accident. He comes over to work on a case file just as they are leaving. He’s in the kitchen with a cup of coffee when he hears their voices from the doorway. It’s a bit of a shock for him. He watched Maggie Scully say her last words, address the two of them. ( _My son is named William, too._ ) He held her hand as she died. He holds back from greeting her with familiarity.

“Mom, Dad, this is my partner, Fox Mulder,” Scully says, motioning him into the living room.

Maggie smiles and shakes his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Fox. Dana’s told us a lot about you.”

“Likewise,” Mulder replies. “And it’s Mulder, please.” He’s apprehensive, and he hopes they can’t tell. He tries not to think about the fact that Maggie had once been in an urn at his feet.

Bill Scully’s voice makes his hands sweat, even though he knows it’s ridiculous. He shakes Mulder’s hand, saying, “So, you head this division? The X-Files?”

“Yes, sir, but your daughter is every bit as important to its success, if not more so.” He is kissing up, but he doesn’t care because it’s true, in every universe.

Scully’s father looks astonished for a minute, and then turns to smile proudly at Scully, clapping her on the shoulder. He remembers the Boggs case, knows how hard this must be for her. She was worried her father wasn’t proud of her. He is.

“So, what kind of work are you doing so soon after the holidays?” Maggie asks with poorly veiled disapproval and curiosity in the same breath. For once, Mulder’s at a loss to explain.

“A murderer that Mulder helped catch is scheduled for execution in a few days,” Scully says briskly. “He’s been indicating that he plans to do something to evade his death. Mulder wanted to go over the casefile with me, see if there is any need to investigate.”

“My goodness,” Maggie says, eyes wide. “That does sound… important.” She looks vaguely green. Did they ever discuss cases with her in the other place? He seriously doubts it. Only when Scully was hurt.

Captain Scully has been largely silent through this exchange, sizing up the two of them. “Well, we’d better let them get back to it, Maggie,” he says. “Be careful, Starbuck.”

Scully hugs her father, and Mulder can tell that she is fighting for composure. “I will,” she says in a small voice.

Maggie kisses her daughter’s cheek, and adds, “It was nice to have met you, Fox.”

“Agent Mulder,” Captain Scully says with a nod in his direction. Mulder nods back politely, not bothering to correct him. Scully walks them to the door, and leans heavily against it after closing it.

“You okay?” Mulder asks quietly, resting a hand on her shoulder.

She nods, stepping away without looking at him. “I’m fine,” she says, her usual  maddening mantra. “It’s just that… I still can’t believe he’s alive.”

There are ghosts lurking everywhere that he knows they may never exorcise. He hasn’t spoken to either of his parents in months, maybe because the thought of them being alive is jarring and it’s easier to forget if they maintain their distant relationship. But there is something different in meeting Scully’s father. He’d never met the man in the other place. And seeing Maggie again… it must been ten times harder for Scully; they’re her parents, she has a good relationship with them. How many people has she watched die at this point?

Scully turns, on the verge of tears, and steps towards him, burying her face in his chest. He wraps his arms around her shoulder, kissing the top of her head. “Thank you,” she says in that same small voice, and he hugs her tighter.

***

“I just got a call from Raleigh PD,” Mulder says as she enters the office the next day, slamming down the phone. “Boggs escaped from prison.”

“What?” she says, shocked, hand slipping on the leather of her briefcase. Boggs, in his ramblings and reedy build, had hardly seemed like the type to escape from prison. But appearances can be deceiving; Boggs is smart, she knows that much. They still never figured out if he orchestrated the kidnapping and Mulder’s shooting in the other place.

“Apparently he convinced a guard that his mother was going to die and he was the only one who could save her, and he had to ‘commune with her essence’ in person in order to do it.” Mulder’s tone is mocking and disgusted. “Guard broke him out. He was found strangled. Boggs is gone.”

“My God, Mulder…”

“They want us to come down and assist in his recapture.”

She is already shaking her head. “Mulder, no. This could be another plot for revenge! You could end up bleeding out on the floor of a warehouse again!” It’s a similar argument to the one they had years ago, except their roles are reversed, and she is determined to fight him on this. It’s not going to happen again.

“I’m the only one who knows Boggs well enough to find him, Scully. If I don’t go, he could kill again.”

“He could kill _you,_ ” she snaps.

“I’m not letting the lives of innocents on my conscience, Scully, not when we have a chance to take him down. And if I know you, you should feel the same way.”

Hurt, she says, “You do know me.” After all this uncertainty, even the suggestion that they’re not who they say they are is unthinkable. And she does feel the same way. She just. Just doesn’t want to lose him again.

Mulder’s expression softens a fraction. “And you know me,” he says. “So you know why I have to do this.”

She does know him. Scully twists the pencil in her hand, stares at the desktop. “Why _we_ have to do this. You’re not going alone.”

***

They examine Boggs’ cell with scrutiny. There’s newspapers scribbled over with indecipherable ramblings about spirits and the dead and God. Scully is flipping through the papers, looking for something they can use, when she comes across something that makes her blood freeze in her veins.

_Bill’saliveBill’saliveMelissa’saliveTeena’saliveMaggie’saliveSamantha’saliveSamantha’saliveSamantha’saliveSamantha’salive._

It’s written multiple times up and down the paper in a spidery scrawl that makes Scully’s stomach turn in on itself. She folds it up and stuffs it in her pocket, shivering wildly. “Find anything?” she calls across to Mulder, tries to hide the quiver in her voice and hands.

He shakes his head. He’s agitated, guilt complex driving him like a work horse. He’s flipping through the newspapers so furiously that she’s surprised they aren’t ripping.

She goes back to flipping through his papers. The paper she stole sits like a stone in her pocket.

***

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Mulder huffs back in their hotel room. (She’d insisted on getting just one, doesn’t want him to be alone.) “Where would Boggs go? His entire family is dead. He has no home anymore, he’s been in prison for years.”

“He told me he was afraid of death,” she says, sitting gingerly on the bed. “In the… other place. He told me he was afraid of going back to the chair.”

“Who the hell isn’t afraid of death?” He yanks his fingers through his hair stressfully, collapsing into a chair.

She is. She knows what’s on the other side and never wants to go back there again. “What about Lucas Henry?” she offers. “Could he be… real as opposed to a result of that place? Could he be an accomplice?”

By the next day, it’s clear that Lucas Henry doesn’t exist. There is no one named Lucas Henry in the Raleigh area.

***

They’re going through his cell again, shaking out his sheets and pillowcases when she finds it, a meticulously folded piece of paper in the corner of the bare mattress. She unfolds it to find a furious blue scrawl across the typeset words, and Boggs’ messy handwriting: _Avoidthedevildontfollowhimtothedevilleavethattome._ It is exactly what he said to her years ago, in the other place, and she shudders violently before remembering. “Mulder, I know where he is,” she calls.

He’s at her side in minutes, hunched over the rickety prison cot. “Where?”

She underlines the words with one finger. “The Blue Devil Brewery,” she says. “Where I found Lucas Henry last time.”

He stares at the paper, brow furrowed. “How do you know?”

“This is what he told me,” she says. “Before. In the other place.”

Mulder grabs the paper from her hand, turning it over and over. “How…”

“I don’t know.” It terrifies her, this feeling of not knowing. It’s the way Boggs made her feel before. How can he do this, a person who has never really met her? “I don’t know, but this is the first steady lead we’ve gotten.”

“It could be a trap,” he says softly.

_His blood is warm under her fingers. She tucks her jacket around him. She snaps at the paramedics despite knowing nothing about his medical history. She is a damn doctor and she wants to save her new partner because she can’t lose anyone else. She clumsily holds his hand in the ambulance. He breathes and that’s the most important thing._

_She finally backs off when they reach the hospital. There’s nothing she can do for him now. It’s her job to find the kidnapper and take him down._

She swallows back her protests, and says, “Every job we take could be a trap. Could be dangerous. We need to this.”

Mulder gulps, nods, stands first and squeezes her hand when he helps her up.

***

They split up to search the brewery, even though she hates it, wants to protect him. Her team is the first to find Boggs. “Federal agent, drop your weapon!” she shouts when they do, the same song and dance she’s been doing for years, aiming her gun steadily. Boggs has the guard’s gun, but he aims it clumsily and eventually lets it drop. Mulder had mentioned, once, that he wasn’t very good with guns. He looks exactly the same as the other place, sounds exactly the same.

“I knew you’d find me, Dana,” Boggs says sweetly as she handcuffs him. “I wanted a chance to talk to you.”

“What the hell could you want to say to me?” she snaps. It’s a little strange that he knows who she is, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility. He could’ve been following Mulder’s movements, could’ve read about her in newspapers.

“I _know_ you,” he whispers, and she shudders involuntarily. “I remember you… and I know you remember me.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She’s grateful that the other officers are still securing the building, aren’t here to see her like this, shaking with fear.

“We both know you’ve been to that cold, dark place, Scully. You and Mulder were there for a long, long time.”

“You-you have the right to remain silent,” she stammers, dragging him to his feet.

“Mulder’s blood on the white cross…” he says in a singsong. “Those kids, the Blue Devil, your father… I remember it all. I _see_ it.”

“Shut up,” she hisses, her head spinning. How could he know, it _wasn’t real_ …

“Everyone else may be alive, but I could let you talk to your daughter. She’s still a part of that cold dark place, Scully.” Boggs is eager in his twisted way. “Let me go. Let me go, and I’ll let you talk to her.”

“Shut the _hell_ up,” she hisses, tears pricking her eyes like daggers. “It wasn’t real, you don’t know about it, you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“Oh, it’s realer than you think, Dana.” His voice has picked up the cadence of a child, and Scully wants to recoil from him, wants to throw up.

Mulder is there, suddenly, yanking Boggs away from her and pulling him towards the car. “You heard her; shut the hell up,” he says through clenched teeth. Scully follows on shaky legs, numb all over.

Boggs sing _Beyond the Sea_ all the way back to the prison, and Mulder turns up the radio to try and drown him out, but it doesn’t work. Scully can still hear the cadence of the lyrics, his out of tune rendition, and she knows she is going to call her father as soon as they get back to the hotel.

The guards come and get him from the car. “Your sister’s alive,” Boggs calls as they lead him inside. “I know where she is.”

“You fucking bastard…” Mulder growls, taking a step towards them. Scully lays a hand on his bicep and he stops, looking down at her with some twisted expression of rage and sorrow on his face.

She pulls Boggs’ wrinkled paper from her pocket and hands it to him. “I found this,” she says. “In his cell. Mulder, I think he knows…”

He visibly shudders, letting the paper fall from his hands and onto the wet pavement. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “He’s a murderer, and he’s going to die.”

He turns and heads for the car without looking back.

***

Mulder goes to Boggs’ execution. Scully stays at the hotel, watching Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in the background. She’d forgotten the date until she’d turned on the TV.

Mulder breezes in the door five minutes til midnight. She’s half asleep against the pillows, so the slam of the door scares her and she fumbles for her gun on the bedside table before he speaks. “Scully, it’s me. It’s okay.”

She nods, sitting up and smoothing back wayward hair. “Sorry, I’ve just been jumpy lately.”

“It’s okay. I get it. Boggs was a monster, and he got to me, too, but at least he’s gone now.”

She nods again, not sure what to say. In the run-together of these past few days, she’s missed them, their rhythm and interactions. Things were almost good before the onset of fear over her father’s death and fucking Luther Lee Boggs. At least the better of the two men is alive; it almost feels like a happy ending.

Mulder sighs, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Scully, I’m sorry about the past couple of days. They’ve been… well, hard seems like something of an understatement… but hard.”

“It’s okay. I know how you get in these situations. I understand it. And it’s not like I’ve been any better.”

He laughs without much humor in it, unconsciously rubbing her chilled feet - some long-lost habit of their years of living together, because West Virginia is always freezing. “I mean… how would Boggs even know about the other place? Could he really see all that?”

“It’s a part of us,” Scully says softly.

“In the other place, the first time, you told me you were afraid to believe.” His eyes meet hers, an unasked question. His hand comes up to squeeze her knee.

“I’m still afraid to believe.” She presses her hand on top of his. “I’ve always been afraid. But at this stage, Mulder… what choice do I have?”

“So, it’s not I want to believe, it’s I have to believe?”

“Exactly. We should get a new poster made.”

He laughs and kisses her hand. She shivers, wants to pull him closer. On the TV, they’ve started the countdown to the new year. 1994, a year she’s already lived through. _May it go differently this time_ , she thinks.

“Do you think the world will end?” he asks. His eyes are unfathomably dark, focused entirely on her.

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

“Three… two… one…” the people on the TV chant.

She kisses him. Kisses him with the TV and Dick Clark as a backdrop. Kisses him like it’s 2000 and the world didn’t end. Kisses him in a motel room, like the third time in Oregon. Kisses him hard because she’s missed him too much. And he kisses her back, fingers tangling in her hair and brushing the nape of her neck.

“Scully,” he says.

“Hmm.” She kisses his jawline.

“Scully,” he says more urgently, more serious. He sounds scared.

She pulls away, their noses still nearly touching because she doesn’t want to let go of him. “Mulder, what is it?”

“Your neck.”

“What?” She runs her hand along the back. “There’s not a bee, is there?” she teases, but the look on his face is enough to stop her.

“Let me see the back,” he says, so damn softly.

He is scaring her. She twists on the bed, lifting her hair so he can see it. His fingers touch the skin there gently, so fucking gently. “Mulder, what is it?” she says, and she feels like she’s in a motel room nine months/twenty three years ago, but then she was frantic and now she’s so frightened that her voice can’t get any louder.

“There’s a scar,” he says, in the same tone he used in hospitals. “You have a chip, Scully.”

“What?” Her fingers fly to the back of her neck. She can feel it, the slight bump underneath her skin that has been there for most of her false life. But this is her real life. How the fuck did she not feel it before?

She turns, and Mulder is looking at her with those tender eyes that make her want to scream and comfort him all at the same time. He looks as terrified as she feels. “But when could they have…” he starts, voice trailing off in confusion.

She suddenly has a terrible feeling. “Mulder, turn around,” she says.  

He obliges silently. She leans forward, hand running over the back of his neck, over the small scar and small (almost invisible, really) protrusion there.


	5. Chapter 5

 

**five.**

_1994_

They don’t take out the chips.

Mulder tries to make himself the martyr again, insisting that they need to know the nature of the chips and they can always just put it back in, but Scully refuses. “I’m not risking it,” she says, pacing the room. “I don’t care, it’s not worth it.” _You don’t know what it’s like to die, and I’m never going to let you find out._

“If we don’t do this, then we’ll never know…”

“I’m alright with not knowing.”

“Scully…” he says, irritably.

“Mulder, don’t take the goddamn chip out. If you do, I’m done.”

He blinks in hurt surprise, anger settling in on top of it. “I hardly think it’s fair for you to use our relationship, or whatever the hell this is, as a bargaining factor,” he says, voice drawn tight with anger. She wants to kiss him again, reassure him that she loves him, wants to make this all fade away.

“I don’t have anything else to bargain with.” Her voice breaks for the first time. “I can’t lose you, Mulder.” She looks away, at the stained shag carpet of yet another hotel room they are arguing in. They almost never really argued in hotel rooms during the first seven years, and always argued in hotel rooms circa 2002. Her eyes sting.  

He sighs, shoulders hunched up as he buries his face in his hands. “And I can’t lose you,” he mutters to his palms like a bizarre prayer. “Scully, what if… what if taking them out won’t kill us, and what if leaving them in offers us up on a silver platter? You’re right when we say we don’t knowthe effects. This is the best way to find out.”

“If you really feel that way, then let me take mine out.”

He blanches, stares up at her with dark eyes, bites his lip and doesn’t say anything. “That’s what I thought,” she says, hating the venom in her voice. “If we do this, we do it together.” _Live together, die together, haven’t you learned that that’s how this works, Mulder?_ “We’ll find the people who did this to us and the people who hurt your sister, and this’ll all be over someday.” _And maybe then we can be happy for once in our damn lives._

“How do you know we’ll find them?” he snaps, voice tight. “How do you know Boggs wasn’t lying, how do you know she’s alive? How do you know I’m not fucking _crazy_?”

“I’d said there’s plenty of evidence of that in our necks,” she says, and immediately regrets it.

“Goddamn it, Scully.” He gets up and storms out of the room without looking at her, slamming the door behind him.

She switches off the TV and the lights and crawls into bed. She does not sleep. She blinks back tears that sting her eyes.

Mulder is back within the hour, bringing in a blast of cold air with him. “Fuck them,” he says unevenly. “Fuck them for doing this to us. We’re supposed to be working together, not against each other.”

Scully raises up on one elbow, says, “Do you still have the chip?” She has to know, hates to ask.

“Yes.” He wordlessly sits on the edge of the bed, lets her run her fingers over the back of his neck like they’re at the Icy Cape. “You?”

She nods.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry, Scully.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she whispers. “But I can’t lose you.”

She grabs a handful of his shirt, pulls him down next to her. They hold onto each other in the same way they did in a hotel room in 2002, mirroring the Schiffs in North Carolina. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry I got us both killed. I’m sorry I keep pushing you away.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says against her lips. “You did what you have to do.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“It’s okay.” He kisses her forehead. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”

They fall asleep with their foreheads rested together, arms wrapped around each other.  

***

After their flight home the next day, Mulder drives them both back to Scully’s apartment. He doesn’t leave for three days.

***

“I have no idea how to write this report for Blevins,” she says, smacking the screen with irritation.

“The truth is out there, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be in your report,” Mulder jokes, kissing her neck as he sits beside her on her couch.

She swats him away irritably. “I’m serious. I don’t want to throw you under the bus, Mulder, and I don’t know what Blevins wants from me. He’s been angry at all of my reports since the Oswald case.”

He’s serious suddenly. “Scully, why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugs. “It seemed… inconsequential. I’m okay. They didn’t threaten me or anything.”

He kisses her again, tugs the laptop out of her lap into his, scans her report. “Scully, I think you should convince them I am crazy,” he says.

Scully blinks in surprise. “What?”

“It’s what they expect from you, and it could draw their attention away from our real work.”

“Mulder, what if that draws enough attention to the X-Files that they shut us down?”

“Then we’ll continue our work outside the FBI.”

“Mulder, this is your… life’s work,” Scully says stubbornly. “I can’t discredit you.”

He touches her shoulder gently. “Yes, you can. If it means we might win, you can.”

She sighs, shoving the laptop away from them. “I don’t like this.”

“Believe me, Scully, I’ve been discredited by enough people; you’ll just be added to the long list.”

“That’s not funny,” she says fiercely. “I may not believe you half the time, but I’ve never thought you were crazy.”

“You said you did, our last morning in the other place.”

“I was kidding,” she says, tilting his chin so that he is facing her. “Mulder. I don’t think you’re crazy. I never have, and I never will. Do you understand me?”

“Hey, Scully, it’s okay,” he says with a small smile, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I know. I’ve known. You can let the Syndicate and Blevins think you do, though. Okay?”

She sighs again, kisses him fiercely.

Blevins is delighted with her subsequent report. She hates him all the more for it.

***

“Dana!”

Scully jolts awake, blinking in surprise at the use of her first name. Mulder’s asleep, shoving at the sheets and muttering her first name. “Mulder,” she whispers. “Mulder, wake up.”

He wakes slowly and panics quickly, tugging her into his arms and pressing her face into her hair. She hugs him tightly, whispering, “What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Willis case,” he says to her hairline. “You were taken. You were gone.” He wraps himself tightly around her.

“I’m okay. It’s okay,” she whispers, smoothing his hair until his breathing slows, his panic dissipates.

He sighs, pressing his nose against her neck. “It was… vivid,” he says. “Like I was really there, and I thought you might really die.”

“I’ve had those dreams, too,” she says. There was a whole series of him shot and bleeding in North Carolina. Their other life is still a part of them, buried beneath the surface where no one can see it. It exists completely inside their own heads, and that may be the scariest part.

He pulls her closer, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She relaxes into his embrace, feeling the stress slowly fall away. “You called me Dana,” she says.

“I called you Dana then,” he says.

She remembers, the way he’d slip in a _Dana_ when he was trying to be personal. It had been sweet, endearing, his small attempt at intimacy, a strengthening of their friendship.

“Do you remember why I stopped?” he continues, kissing the top of her head.

She scrunches her nose as if concentrating. “I think I asked you to.”

He snorts. “You don’t know how to tell a story, Scully.” (She rolls her eyes.) “Remember when the Bureau put you on that case while I was recovering from my gunshot wound?”

“Hmm, yeah, I think so.” Not especially. It’s been twenty-four years (in her mind or whatever), and she tends not to remember the Mulder-less cases.

“It was an X-File,” Mulder says smugly. “And you didn’t think so, but you could see that it was unusual.”

The Boggs case fresh in her mind, it had been easy to think of it from Mulder’s perspective. “Didn’t I ask you for help?”

“You’d bring the files and dinner over when you came to check on me, and you asked me to look over the case. And I figured it out. The perpetrator was an invisible man.”

She does remember this case, actually. Colton never let her forget it. “It was _not_ an invisible man,” she says hotly.

“It was,” he says, obviously pleased with himself.

She rolls away to glare at him. “I can’t believe we’re having this argument years later about a _fake_ case that we solved in Hell! For God’s sake, Mulder…”

He holds up a finger dramatically. “The rest of the story proves my point, Scully, give me a second. Anyway, despite our arguments about the visible spectrum of our killer, we did manage to  figure out the _pattern_ of the killings, the locations around DC.”

“We figured it out with less than half an hour left until the next murder,” she says, remembering. “It would be at the Lincoln Memorial, and I just had enough time to get there.”

“And you, quite literally, threw my cell phone at me, grabbed your gun, yelled at me to send the team to the memorial, and ran out the door.” He shakes his head in disapproval, but he is smiling. (It’s almost easier to find things funny now, to forget that the last time she did that they were shot. It’s easier to laugh at this case because neither of them was hurt too badly and it was a long, long time ago.)

She shakes her head with the same disapproval. “First of all, it was in an attempt to save an innocent civilian. Second of all, you can’t say anything because you came after me and called Colton from the taxi. On crutches! You dropped your gun when you were trying to get out of the car!”

“I wasn’t going to let you approach an invisible criminal by yourself,” he says. “Besides, it’s a good thing I did because I found you unconscious on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. You _literally_ never saw him coming, you admitted that yourself. Invisible man by default.”

_The first thing she hears is the crutches clattering on the marble. The ache reverberates through her head, Mulder’s huge palm brushing her forehead as he says her first name. “Dana? Dana, are you okay?”_

_She groans, the marble and the sky and Mulder spinning above her like a merry-go-round. “Don’t,” she gets out through clenched teeth._

_“Don’t what? What is it?” His hand is still brushing her face, pushing back her hair._

_Because she’s stubborn, she forces herself to her feet, stumbling a little and swallowing back nausea, using Mulder for balance because there’s no way she could get up otherwise. He shouldn’t be crouching like this, he’s straining his wound, they’re both ridiculous and hurt and ridiculously hurt. She tugs him up with her, handfuls of his t-shirt, and stumbles again with his added weight. “Don’t call me Dana.”_

“I asked you not to call me Dana _before_ the Dupre case,” she says, rising up on an elbow to look at him. She enjoys the tiny moments where she is taller than him. “So why did you do it?”

He shrugs. “Moment of weakness. I was scared I’d never see you again, and I didn’t want the last thing I said to you to be your surname. And I wanted you to feel safe.” She smiles; he is overwhelmingly sweet in these moments and she loves him silly. “Why did you ask me to stop?” He pokes her in the ribs, teasing.

She shrugs. “I liked that you called me Scully, strange as it sounds. It seemed like… our thing, I dunno. I almost wanted to keep Dana and Scully separate, and you fit into the Scully part.”

Grinning, he tugs on her wrist, and she falls against his shoulder, holding back un-Scullylike giggles. “So were you mad when I called you Dana again?”

“No,” she says, kissing his shoulder. “I thought it was sweet.” She kisses his cheek, the bridge of his nose.“How did we catch that guy, anyway?”

“I don’t remember. Colton probably did.”

“Hmm. I bet he never let us hear the end of it, either.”

“And we got a joint ride to the hospital because you had a concussion and I’d managed to upset my wound to the point of bleeding.”

She smiles. They’d been allowed to go home on the condition that they stayed together and he made sure she stayed awake and she made sure he stayed resting. They’d stayed up on his  couch watching _Back to the Future,_ her not-falling asleep with her pounding head inclined towards his shoulder, and Mulder had typed up her report for her and quipped about the probable statistics of time travel, referring to at least ten X-Files he had on the subject.

Now, Mulder’s quiet for a minute. “The Dupre case was terrible,” he says finally, softly. “That was the first time I thought I’d really lose you. All the other times happened too fast, but that was slow, and I had no idea where you were, and it terrified me.”

“Hey,” she says, moving up to kiss him. “I’m okay. We’re okay here, okay? Jack Willis was a good guy, and he’s not going to come for me. That was all Dupre.”

She waits for him to tease her about admitting he was right, but he doesn’t. “Hey,” he echoes instead. “We’re going to be okay, right? In the end? We’ll both survive? One of us isn’t going to die?”

_I don’t know,_ she thinks. _I hope so,_ she thinks. _If this experience has proved anything, it’s that I can’t live without you,_ she thinks. “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, we might not be if we stay in the FBI forever, I guess. But we’ll be okay. I think… I think this is our opportunity to be okay.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “A little. And I think we should leave someday. After we find Samantha.”

“You do?” she says incredulously. He’s never talked about leaving the Bureau in all the time she’s known him. Her, maybe, but not him. He’d only ever left after being fired, and hadn’t really hesitated at going back. She never thought he would leave the Bureau willingly.

“Don’t get me wrong, Scully, I love our jobs, but… I feel like it’s also a death sentence. And I want it all to be over someday.” He pauses to take her hand, continues warily. “I want to have a life where we don’t worry all the time, maybe… maybe have a baby someday.” He squeezes her fingers.  

She doesn’t reply. Kids is the one subject she is okay to avoid, kids is the subject that’s never been easy with them. She doesn’t know _how_ to reply, doesn’t want to start crying.

“Scully?” Mulder ventures nervously, rubbing warm circles on her shoulder. “Are you okay? Did I say something wrong?”

She raises up on one elbow and kisses him slow. “No. You didn’t. I promise.” She brushes his face, tries to smile. He looks like he might understand.

Later, she has her own Willis/Dupre related nightmares, and slips out of the bedroom so she doesn’t wake Mulder, crouches in the bathroom and presses her forehead against the cool porcelain until the procession of images stop.

***

When they run into Willis, later in the Bureau bullpen, it takes a lot for him not to physically shield Scully. He starts to step in front of her before he feels her hand on his arm. “Jack,” she says, and he can hear the pleasantness masking the strain in her tone. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too,” he says, sounding nothing like Mulder remembers him, probably because he only ever knew him as Dupre. “Oh - happy birthday, by the way.”

Scully smiles, keeping it together remarkably well. “You, too.” She removes her hand from Mulder’s arm to gesture to him. “This is my partner, Fox Mulder. Mulder, Jack Willis.”

Willis offers his hand, and Mulder has no choice but to take it. _Notrealnotrealnotreal_ , he reminds himself. “X-Files unit, right?” he says politely. “I’ve heard about your work. It sounds pretty interesting.”

“It is,” Scully supplies.

“I’ve heard your solve rate has been good,” Willis says. “Heard you were doing an excellent job.”

_It’s too cold in the February air, and they don’t know what’s going on in there, and she sounded so scared on the phone - Scully, who never seems scared - and a gunshot goes off, and he threatened the woman, Lula, if she hurt Scully, but this is the first time he’s thought he’ll really do it._

Scully’s hand brushes his arm again, and he realizes that he’s missed a significant part of the conversation. “Well, we should get lunch sometime,” Willis says. “It’s good to see you, Dana.”

“You, too,” Scully says, nearly steering him away. As soon as they’re out of earshot, she check his pupils, his head, says, “Mulder, what’s wrong? You completely blanked out. I know it’s hard - it’s hard for me, too - but…”

“No, no, Scully…” he says, shoving her hands away (she still enforces her strict no-public-affection-at-the-Bureau rule). “That’s not what… I had some kind of a… flashback. Like I was back when we rescued you. I don’t know… I’ve had them before, but never that vivid. And it’s never really made me blank out like that.”

“I’ve had them, too,” she says. “But never how you described them.” She sounds concerned.

“I’m okay,” he says, in a shaky attempt to reassure.

She nods, stepping away from him and heading for the elevator so as not to arise suspicion. He follows, eyes stealing over to Willis across the bullpen like a magnet. Someone whispers something about the Spookies as they go, and he wonders how the hell that nickname could carry over from (literal) Hell.

***

_Barnett’s running, and she’s toppling backwards with the force of the bullet, a shocked look on her face, and it feels too much like the end even though she’s wearing a vest…_

“Hey, Mulder.” She shakes him awake, small hand on his shoulder. “Mulder, wake up.”

He stares up at her gratefully, wraps an arm around her waist and tugs her down beside him. “Hey,” he mutters, trying to lower his pulse by the feeling of her in his arms, her hair against his cheek. “How was birthday dinner?”

“It was fine.” She shifts to a more comfortable position, still leaning against him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just got sleepy waiting for you to get back.” And his entire dream had consisted of a reliving of Reggie’s death and Scully’s near one.

She kisses his hair, leaning her head on his shoulder. “I told my parents,” she says. “About us.”

“Yeah? What’d they say?” He runs a hand up her chilled arm to warm it.

“They were surprised. My mom seemed okay with it. She liked you the second time around. Guess you’re a charmer.” She nudges him, smiling in her small way. “My dad didn’t say much. He usually didn’t - doesn’t - about these things. Although he did ask if it was wise to engage in personal relations with my partner who I’d be in dangerous situations with.”

Mulder chuckles. “Well, I figured we hear that one eventually, but I wouldn’t have guessed from who.”

“They’ll like you. If not now, then eventually.” She nudges him. “Now, what was wrong when I came in? You looked a little… frantic.”

He sighs. “Dream. About Barnett. And you.”

Her eyes soften. “You okay now?”

“Mmhmm. It was just… startling. After what happened in the other place.”

She nods knowingly. “Mulder, I dreamed about the same thing. Or… I think it might’ve been like what happened to you, when we saw Jack. It was vivid. My chest was sore when I woke up.”

He touches her on the spot where the bullet hit, and she clamps her hand around his. “What do you think this means?” she whispers.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I don’t know.”

***

“Want to go on a road trip?” he asks over coffee and files at her kitchen table.

She pushes her glasses up her nose, and grins up at him. “Let me guess. A nice trip to the forest?”

Mulder doesn’t return the smile. He swallows roughly, as if he doesn’t expect her to respond well. “No, actually,” he says. “I wanted to go to that… army base. The one where we found Samantha’s handprints in the other place. Just to see.”

Oh. Scully reaches out and touches his arm. “Of course I’ll come,” she assures him.

So they go. It doesn’t qualify as a case, so they drive instead of flying. Scully takes the first driving shift, and Mulder makes some joke about her feet not being able to reach the pedals, and she throws a pen at him and tells him to get some sleep.

***

It’s a good thing Mulder’s broken into government facilities hundreds of times before, because Scully honestly doesn’t remember how. He teases her when she asks him to help her climb the fence and she rolls her eyes, and she wonders how much time they have of this normality before it all goes to hell. They walk too close together, inside, like the cavalry is going to descend on them like vultures. The base is empty.

They get to the corner where they found the handprints before, and it is blank. No marks in the cement. No sign of Samantha, or Jeffrey Spender, having been here. Scully recognizes it, even years later (or earlier, take your pick), but Mulder insists on checking every corner, just to be sure. They find nothing else, nothing to indicate his sister was ever here, and Mulder slumps against a tree with defeat.

Scully places a hand on his shoulder. “This is a good thing,” she tells him with comfort she doesn’t believe. “This means things didn’t go like they did in the other place. Your sister could still be alive.”

He nods, but doesn’t answer. He drives halfway home before stopping, unblinkingly staring ahead at the road.

***

“Be careful,” he tells her, leaning over to kiss her cheek.

“Mulder, it’s just a meeting with Blevins. I’ll be fine. They want me to be their spy, remember?”

“Still. You have to let them think you’re on their side, that you don’t believe me. _Really_ don’t believe me, I mean.”

“If nothing else convinces them, these fake reports will,” she says. “And Blevins seems to believe me.”

He nods. “Be careful anyway, okay?”

She smiles and nods, doesn’t kiss him before she leaves so it won’t feel like a goodbye.

Blevins goes over her most recent reports with her, asking questions about Mulder, mostly. Scully lies, and clenches her fingers in her lap so he won’t notice the slight tremble.

“I’m impressed with the new quality of your work, Agent Scully,” Blevins says. “And have you investigated any alien abduction-type cases recently?”

“No,” she lies. Not on FBI records, at least; they’ve been trying to find the original file on Samantha’s disappearance with the help of the Gunmen. (Frohike still flirts with her, and the three of them are exactly how she remembers them, which is comforting. Mulder had almost cried after seeing them alive again, and her emotions had been similar.)

“Hmm.” Blevins scribbles something on the paper he keeps hidden from her sight by the strategically tilted manila folder top. “Not even outside of the Bureau? Has he mentioned digging into his sister’s case?”

“No,” Scully says firmly.

Blevins looks suspicious, but he nods. He makes another note, says, “Thank you, Agent Scully. You may go.”

She’s halfway out of the cramped, dirty room before she remembers the fucking shard of metal in her neck. Imagining Mulder’s charred body curled in on itself, Mulder slowly dying from cancer, Mulder being swallowed up by the light, forces her hand. She turns. “Section Chief Blevins, why do Mulder and I have chips?”

Blevins startles, and he normally shows so little emotion and recovers so fast that she almost thinks she imagined it. “Agent Scully, what are you talking about?”

She bites her lip. It is a bad idea, and for a second, she wonders if she’ll ever get home to Mulder in her warm apartment, smiling with his hands on her waist. “I… we found chips, in the back of our necks. Mulder had a file on them, connecting them to the abductions we first investigated.” She is completely improvising at this point, but they need answers. They’ve both been more cautious lately, melded closer together. Mulder has a tendency to kiss the spot where the chip is. “You said to report what we… found, and I thought you might know…”

Blevins is still making notes, seemingly ignoring her. “Agent Scully, I do not know what you are talking about. And I said that you could leave.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. Goddamn it, she is an idiot. She’s probably put Mulder in danger now. Suddenly she can’t get out of the building fast enough, heels scraping the dirty floor. She drives ten miles over the speed limit, and finds Mulder waiting for her at home.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for somewhat portrayal of the duane barry storyline

**six.**

Her meeting with Blevins is nearly forgotten and so are the chips. Nothing much changes, anyway. Scully still sends a report to Blevins after every case, and she still has Mulder read over them every time. (“If anyone knows how to take me down, it’s me,” he jokes.) But they stop meeting to discuss her reports. She is both relieved and shaken by this.

They start meeting with Skinner pretty regularly, however. Just like in the other place, he is more than a little skeptical of Mulder’s case reports (the ones that go on record instead of to Blevins in pretty white envelopes). It’s strange to see him back in this role. Scully is almost irritated by it, wants to snap at him to get his head out of his ass. It’s hard to forget that this is and isn’t the same man who saved their lives multiple times.

The nightmares and strange flashbacks continue. It’s not much of a surprise for either of them. But as time goes on, they’re almost happy. They rent two hotel rooms on cases and switch off nights. (Mulder is inclined to show up in Scully’s, because her work will be neatly put up and stacked on the desk instead of strewn out all over the place.) They mostly stay at her apartment, since he still does not have a bed. They argue over case files and rent movies and fall asleep in Scully’s bed. It almost feels like 2000 again, like they’re young and stupid and don’t have these years of trauma weighing them down. They are, in actuality, two of these things. (“I keep forgetting,” Scully giggles one night. “I feel like I should be fifty-three.”)

They are almost happy until he sees the month and remembers the year on the calendar that Scully meticulously keeps track of in her kitchen (writing everything down in her neat, rounded handwriting because _I don’t have electronic reminders anymore, Mulder_ ). August, 1994. The month of subliminal messages and Krycek and fucking Duane Barry.

_Not real_ , he thinks. _Notrealnotrealnotreal_.

***

The date grows closer and Mulder grows more cautious. When he has a nightmare about Scully in a coma on a hospital bed, he refuses to leave her side for days after.

Scully eventually notices on the day of, when he moves to follow her out of the office. She sees the date on the calendar, and her hands grow clammy at the sight. “Mulder,” she says, trying to iron any signs of fear or stress from her voice. “I’m _fine_.”

He starts slightly. “What?”

“This is the day,” she says, suddenly realizing why he’d been so clingy recently. “I know you know. But it’s fine. Duane Barry is not going to come for me.”

“Scully…” he starts.

“Mulder, listen,” she says. _It wasn’t real._ “I need some time, okay? I’m headed home.”

“Scully,” he says again.

“I’ll call you if I need you, okay?” She leaves quickly so she can pretend she doesn’t hear shattering glass and her own gasps in the back of her mind.

***

It would be hard to pretend he doesn’t resent her a little for going home alone tonight. It’s true that it’s her trauma to deal with, but they’ve been leaning on each other for comfort so heavily recently that he expected her to want to be near him.

(Maybe he’s an asshole, but her abduction hurt him, too. It spread her mortality out like cards on a table, and rendered it thin to the point of breaking: her stiff, cold hand in his.)

Mulder tries to nap, but that only makes the situation worse. The flashbacks hit in waves - her blood mixed with shattered glass, her drawn, terrified face in Barry’s trunk, her voice on his answering machine. Her screams jolt him out of sleep, and he’s got his hand on the phone and is dialing her number before he remembers.

“It wasn’t real,” he tries, Scully’s mantra over this past year. It doesn’t work - his heart is still thundering in his chest. He finishes dialing and waits, hoping she’ll chide him for worrying too much. Or maybe not, maybe she’ll understand and let him come

over. Maybe they can flush out these too-vivid memories.

But she doesn’t pick up.

He tries to reassure himself that there’s nothing wrong, she’s probably just sleeping or something, even as he drives over to her apartment to check. He reassures himself until he sees the flashing lights, the broken window, and his stomach drops out from beneath him. _Notagainnotagain_.

The scene’s exactly the same: cops, yellow Crime Scene tape that someone lifts for him when he flashes his badge. He scales the steps without breathing, pushes past the assorted officers to scan the apartment. He sees her, and his heart restarts. The scene is eerily familiar: her in a sea of broken glass with a blanket around her shoulders. “I need to call my partner,” she’s saying to the officer. “He kept asking about my partner.”

“Scully,” he says.

She sees him. “Mulder.” The blanket slips from her shoulders and flutters to the ground as she moves towards him. “You’re okay,” she says into his shirt, fingers digging into the cloth as she tugs him close.

“I’m okay…? Scully, are _you_ okay?” He holds her tightly (but not too tightly), mouth pressed to her temple.

She nods, moving away and looking at the ground. Something seizes up inside of him when he sees the bruises around her mouth, her wrists. Goddamnit, it’s the same as before, fucking bastard. Except she’s safe this time, for now. But who fucking knows for how long.

“Agent Scully?” the officer asks. “This your partner?”

She nods again, stiffly. “He can take me to stay at my parents’,” she says. “I’d like to wait and give my statement in the morning, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, ma’am.” The officer meets Mulder’s eyes, and he nods regretfully. Mulder nods back, politer than he feels, retrieving the blanket from the ground to drape over Scully’s shoulders, even though it’s August and not at all cold outside.

As soon as they’ve gotten past the crime scene, past the oceanic cluster of police officers, Scully hugs him again, pressing her face into the hollow of his throat. “Scully,” he whispers. “What happened? Was it…”

“It was him. Except it… wasn’t him. He was different. Different clothes. And he didn’t try to take me right away. After he had me… restrained… he made a phone call. He said that he had me, and he asked if he should go for you next. And then he said, ‘Okay, if you have it handled, I’ll bring her there and meet you’.” She holds him tighter, burrows against him, shaking in his arms

He is nearly shaking himself, filled with rage. He has questions, lots of them, but now is not the time to ask them. “Okay, it’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m okay. I promise. I’ll take you to your parents if you want.”

She shakes her head. “Hotel. You come, too. There might be someone who comes for you.”

He wants to point out that if They are after him that she’ll be safer somewhere else, but he also knows they’ll both feel safer together. “Okay,” he says.

He calls Skinner and asks him to send someone to check out his apartment. Scully dozes uneasily with her head against the window (she almost jumps out of her skin at one point when he hits the brake too hard), but she holds his hand the entire time.

Skinner calls him back while Scully is in the shower and tells him that someone broke in and they’re investigating the scene now. He closes his eyes and rests his head against the peeling-wallpaper-wall. If he’d been there, what would happen to Scully? The neighbors may have called the cops on Duane Barry or whoever the hell he is, but who’s to say that someone else won’t come, if They’re looking for both of them?

He’s already hung up the phone by the time Scully comes out, looking shaken with wet hair dripping down the back of his shirt. “Sorry all the hot water is gone,” she says.

“It’s fine. Feel any better?”

“A little.” She crawls under the comforter, looks up at him with those ocean-ice blue eyes. “I keep trying to tell myself it wasn’t real. But this one was.”

He doesn’t know what he could say that would be comforting. He slides into bed beside her and lets her curl against him. She’s trembling, weight of wet hair soaking into his shirt front, and he doesn’t care. “Shhh,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”

“We don’t know that.” Her nose presses into his chest. “He wanted you, too. They want you, too.”

“They’re not going to get us.”

“They might. Because we have the goddamn chips.”

“Hey, Scully, Scully.” He traces soothing circles on her back, trying not to let his own crazed worrying crawl out from under his skin. “It’s all right. I’m right here. You should try and get some sleep.”

She ignores him. “What did Skinner say on the phone?”

He doesn’t want to tell her. “My apartment was broken into.”

She shakes her head firmly, grabbing him and pulling him against her. “No,” she says into his hair. “Nonono.”

“We’re okay,” he whispers again. He feels like he’s had to say it too much.

“Mulder,” she whispers. “Mulder.”

“I’m here,” he whispers. “I’m here.”

***

He holds her hand under the table as they give their statements. If anyone notices, they either don’t comment, or don’t care. Scully’s voice is a monotone as she recounts how Barry attacked her. She says that he didn’t include his motive.

“We’re at a loss for that, too, honestly,” the officer says. “He was an employee of the CDC. Wife, kids, good life.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Scully’s voice is hard.

He nods awkwardly. “Well, it’s all out of our hands now. Your people took him into custody.”

Mulder doesn’t know what that means but it can’t be good. Scully squeezes his hand.

They leave together. Mulder climbs into the driver’s seat, but doesn’t start the car. She is silent beside him, staring straight ahead.

“Scully?” he asks gently.

She absently climbs over the console, settling into his lap. He pulls her against him, kissing her jaw gently. They stay like that for a long time.

***

Duane Barry. He has the exact same history as the other place, except for the alien abduction and the mental institution. No, instead he’s a well respected employee of the goddamn government. And in federal custody. When Mulder calls and asks to talk to him, they refuse. He tries to go through Skinner, and Skinner tells him that there’s nothing he can do. “She’s my partner,” he says pleadingly.

“And they’ve got it under control,” Skinner says, almost sympathetically.

Wherever Duane Barry is, there is no way he’s being punished. He’ll probably “disappear” from prison, and Scully will have to spend the rest of her damn life looking over her shoulder.

They never find out who broke into his apartment. It is cleaned and ready to live in within two days. Scully wants to go back to his apartment because she is tired of motel living (they’ve spent probably about an eighth of their lives together in motel rooms, he tells her and she laughs quietly) and isn’t ready to go back to her place. She keeps her gun in arms reach: on her lap in the car, on the coffee table. ( _I’m sorry about the bed,_ he says quietly [goddamnit why didn’t he buy one when they started dating?]. _It’s fine,_ she says.)

She insists they go back to work on the third day. “We should wait to take sick days until we really need them,” she insists, unloading the dishwasher with such force that he wouldn’t be surprised if a few cracked.

“Scully, you need more time.”

“No, I don’t. All that’s left is bruises.”

There’s more left than that, and they both know it. This has happened too many times. “Scully,” he starts, a sentence he won’t finish.

“Stay home if you want, but I’m going to work tomorrow,” she snaps, wringing out the dish towel with an answering bite, and that’s the end of it. They report to the office and work on paperwork.

She likes to sleep with her face pressed into the space between his shoulder blades and her arm wrapped tightly around his chest, like if she doesn’t hold onto him, he might disappear. He doesn’t mind; all he needs is the reminder that she’s here and safe. The couch is cramped, but it manages to fit them both. They sleep curled close enough that it works.)

They have stunningly vivid nightmares. Hers are an event: sweaty covers, flailing hands, and occasional screams. His, he is better at hiding. He slips up only once; Scully shakes him awake on his scream of her name, saying, “Mulder, Mulder, it’s okay, I’m right here.” She is crying. He thinks he might be, too.

They stare at each other with frenzied relief in the half-light. He presses frantic kisses along the salty expanse of her cheekbone, and she swallows a sob, clenching her hands in his shirt.

***

“You should go,” he says one night when they are in bed, and her arm is slung over him.

“We’re not doing this again, Mulder,” she says immediately.

It somehow makes this easier if he doesn’t look at her. “This has happened too many times, Scully. You can’t stay.”

“That logic is fucking ridiculous. We have chips in our neck. They can find us anywhere. Leaving each other will out a giant fucking bulls-eye on our chests.”

He looks away from her wrists, which are still bruised, wincing. “I don’t want you to get hurt because of me.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” she says, gentler. “You never met him.”

“We don’t know that it doesn’t, Scully. We were looking for Samantha, and then he takes you, on the same day he took you in the other place? That can’t be a coincidence. And I won’t let it happen again.”

“Mulder, if anyone is to blame here, it’s me.”

She says it faintly with a resolved conviction. Her voice is too serious for her to be _just_ reassuring him. He turns to face her. “What do you mean?”

She grimaces. “I asked Blevins about the chips.”

He is quiet, having no idea how to respond. He never expected her to say that.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” she says. “But I wanted answers. Blevins acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“And you think that’s why someone came for us?”

She nods.

“It can’t be,” he says. “Because they’re the ones who gave us the chips in the first place. How could that make them come for us?”

She is shaking her head. “I don’t think so. Blevins could’ve been lying, but why would they give me a chip? I’m their little spy, remember?”

“Maybe they didn’t trust you.”

“Then why would they hire me?” She is tense, burying her face in the throw pillow.

He lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. “We don’t know that it’s your fault,” he says. “The two could be unrelated events. The chips help them track us, right? They could have been planning this for a long time.”

“That doesn’t excuse the fact that I was reckless and put us both in danger,” she says, too clinical, too matter-of-factly. “And I didn’t tell you about it for months.”

“It was something I would’ve done,” he says.

“And I never would’ve let you hear the end of it.”

“Scully. I don’t blame you, all right? I blame them. They’re the ones who did this to us.”

“You should,” she says into the pillow. “Blame me.”

“I don’t,” he says, firmly. “We’re okay, and that’s what matters.”

“Okay.” She rolls over to face him. “Okay, but if we’re not next time?”

They have to be. “What are you saying?” he says cautiously.

“I’m saying… you have a point, about this happening too many times.”

His breath catches and he reminds himself that this is what he wanted. “So… are you leaving?”

“No, nonono,” she says quickly. “I’m saying…” She pauses, gripping his elbow. “I’m saying what if I move in?” she says decisively.

Mulder raises up to look at her in surprise. “Are you serious?”

“Mulder,” she says, quite serious. “You worry about me. I worry about you, too. You don’t know how many times I’ve been scared I’m going to lose you besides this time.” She takes his hand, squeezes it. “I love you. So yes. I’m serious. I think we’d both feel a lot safer if we lived together again,” she adds softly.

He’s quiet for a second. “And you want to move in with me?”

Scully rolls her eyes. “Well, not if you’re going to be smug about it.”

Mulder smirks. He’s turning the idea over, trying to decide if it’s a risk worth taking. “Won’t people notice if we’re living together?”

“Mulder, nobody pays attention to us at the FBI.”

Mulder decides on a whim. “Skinner would know,” he says, kissing her quickly on the forehead.

She moves to lean against his shoulder. “Skinner won’t care.”  
***

Another month passes. Scully refuses to go back to their apartment. “Too many things have happened there,” she says, and Mulder mentally catalogues them all: _her father, Duane Barry - twice, Melissa, Pfaster, William._ “We’ll move to your place. We can use my bed.” They agree that she should keep her apartment so that her address can remain the same on public records, but otherwise decide to relocate her things to her apartment.

(“Are you sure you want to move here instead of somewhere else?” he asks her. Plenty of terrible things have happened in these four walls, too. She once told him [in a motel room in 2002] that she’d slept here when he was dead.

“There’s much less ghosts here,” she says, and that’s that.)

Her anxiety seems to ease up a little bit as time passes. She still wakes up shaking sometimes in the middle of the night, he’ll still find her in the kitchen hunched over a cup of coffee and staring blankly into the dark liquid, or clutching the edge of the sink in the bathroom, forehead pressed to the porcelain. But overall, she is less jumpy, more secure in her day-to-day routine. They are healing.

***

Halfway through their unloading, she shoves a stack of boxes to the side and collapses on his couch - their couch, now. “I hate you, Mulder,” she mutters from behind her fingers.

He gestures at the clutter of her things along the floor. “Good timing.”

She glares up at him. “You were supposed to get the Gunmen over here to help!”

“Come on, Scully. They said they were busy, and I didn’t want to push them. When you live through the deaths of your only friends, you don’t want to push them into doing things they don’t want to do after you get them back.”

“Oh, nice. Pull the ‘we spent 23 years in Hell’ card.” Scully props her feet up on the coffee table, crossing her arms. “And besides, they aren’t your only friends. You have me.”

Mulder sits beside her, and tugs on a loose strand of her hair. “You’re a lot more than that, Scully. I could never get Frohike to move in.”

She grins quickly. “Shut up, Mulder. It was time. I never moved back earlier.”

He smiles back. “So this is how you’re making it up to me?”

“More or less. Now, come on.”

“What?” he protests as she stands and moves towards the door. “I just sat down!”

“I don’t care. We’ve got to get the bed inside before it gets dark.”

“Who needs a bed? I think the couch serves our needs perfectly fine.”

“Mulder, I’m not having this argument again. Two full grown adults cannot sleep on a couch every night. This past month should prove that to you.”

(He’s fallen off a couple of times.)

“Hmph.” Still gently teasing, he crosses his arms and fakes a pout. “I say we wait for a water bed to mysteriously appear again.”

“Mulder…” She rolls her eyes, but the hint of a smile is on her face.

“C’mon, Scully! It could be fun! We could have our own TV show: _Bedwatch_.”

“Mulder. If you want me to sleep here tonight, come and help me move the bed in.”

He grins slightly and follows her outside.  
***

“You know,” he says. “All your stuff is here now. You don’t have to steal my shirts anymore.”

Scully makes a face at him. “Shut up, Mulder.” She surveys the room quickly before climbing into bed. “What do you think? Does my bed go with the decor?”

Mulder shrugs, climbing next to her. “It works.”

The room is quiet before she speaks again, voice sleepy and slurry. “Mulder?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you think it means?”

“What?”

“Duane Barry coming back. On the same day. I mean, I know I can guess why, but… how could the timeline be perfectly matched like that? How can he… exist?”

He wraps an arm around her shoulders and she leans into him. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “But it’s not going to happen again. It’s not going to be the way it was. Nothing’s gonna happen to us. I promise.”

They fall asleep with their limbs knotted together, and her head against his chest. In the night, she starts to shake and whimper in her sleep, in the throes of another nightmare. He smooths her hair and kisses the top of her head, stroking her back until she relaxes.

“I love you,” he whispers, but she remains silent, her breathing steady against his shirt.


	7. Chapter 7

**seven.**

_1995_

Living together is different, somehow, than it was before. They still argue over household chores and don’t cook a lot because neither of them has much of a talent for it (there is a lot of takeout and frozen commodities and salads and ice cream at Scully’s insistence) and obsessively rearrange things because they can’t agree on what looks best where (the fish are moved so much that a molly starts to look a little woozy). But it is also entirely different, mostly because he isn’t holed up in his study while she goes to work every day (she’d stayed home with him for almost a year before declaring herself as too cramped, too closed off in their little house [which had hardly seemed fair, since he didn’t have an option] and he’d been hurt that she’d wanted to go to work without him, after all these years). They both go to work every day, together and absurdly nervous that Mulder’s neighbors will call Skinner and ask him how in the world two FBI agents could be living together. They fall asleep on the couch from a bad habit of staying up too late working (or Scully falls asleep first, manila folders pressing creases into her cheeks and pen smears on her fingers, and Mulder just curls himself around her [he’s tried to carry her to bed before, and she’d woken up and protested vehemently]). Eventually, Scully insists that they either learn how to stay up later or try not to work so much. So instead, they fall asleep half the time with papers and folders spread over the bed and the floor. There is less space for one of them to fade into, less space to get lost in drafty, creaky hallways and empty words. It is not unlike he’d imagined their future being in 2000, when the future had been a long and possible thing, stretching out ahead, bleak but no bleaker than what was standard with them. He’d kind of pictured them moving in together someday, maybe leaving the FBI and settling down now that he knew what happened to his sister, maybe staying and exploring the world’s dark corners together. It hadn’t mattered as long as they were together, at least in his mind.

(He’d never told Scully about this, his fantasies of them and a happy fucking life. He wishes he had, even if none of it was real. Maybe he wouldn’t have jetted off to Oregon and left her alone and pregnant. Maybe they’d have been happy then; maybe this wouldn’t be their supposed happy ending.)

The flashbacks do not stop. They continue in a stacked way, like babies’ blocks: a muddled child’s version of the alphabet. A is before B, and B is before C, and Duane Barry is before volcanic viruses is before hallucinogens is before Aubrey, Missouri and razors and copper stains. 1995 was a bad year for them, living in the shadow of Scully’s abduction, first few months bleeding through with BJ Morrow’s blade and Pfaster and Milford’s demonic sacrifices and the false Samantha and the cannibals in Dudley and his father’s death and Melissa’s death. The end of the year had seemed like a relief. He’d almost called Scully at midnight to celebrate; he’d almost called just to make sure she was okay.

Worry over Scully seems inevitable at this point. So much had happened to her in a small time stretch. There are almost infinite times that Scully was in danger, and only a few of them are really remembered, really left severe scars, but Mulder remembers them all. He buys calendars that he fills with sloppy cursive of each case and their impact upon them, and hides them where he knows Scully won’t find them because the last thing she needs is a reminder, honestly. The smear of black ink across the glossy white squares looks like a scar in and of itself. The letters dry blotchy, an ugly reminder that he refuses to look at for longer than needed.

The time of the Pfaster case comes quicker than they expect. He doesn’t take any cases and they both take time off. Scully naps restlessly on the couch (their couch, it’s theirs now) with her head on his thigh, and Mulder flips through files while she sleeps with the TV on mute in the background. He hates this, hates the sudden burst of images dancing behind his eyelids: Scully’s car in a ditch, Scully bruised and bound and teary on the floor of Pfaster’s house, Scully sleeping just as restlessly in his hotel room bed with the painfully familiar bruised wrists and ankles and mouth, and his shirt bunched around her waist from the tossing and turning, Scully walking away from him at the DC airport ( _I'm_ fine, _Mulder, thank you for everything, see you Monday_ ) and some strange, painful twist in his stomach of _don't go_. A string of flashbacks, vivid; he can practically feel the dampness of her tears against his shoulder, can feel the fear curling in his chest and squeezing like a vise.

He’s startled out of his reverie at the sound of Scully making a soft sound of protest. “No,” she mutters, still asleep, hands thrown up over her face as if protecting herself. “Nonononono, get away…”

“Scully,” he whispers. “Scully, it’s me, it's okay. You’re safe, it’s just a dream. You’re home. You’re okay.”

She wakes with a start, swallows back a sob and pushes her face into his stomach. “Was so vivid,” she says groggily into his t-shirt. “It wasn’t real?”

“It wasn’t real,” he promises, stroking her hair, just a little. “It wasn’t real.”

A headline pops up on the news about a death fetishest arrested in Minneapolis. He shudders, turns it off before they can see the name.

***

She is scared out of her wits when she hears his shout from the bathroom, nearly breaks down the door in her attempts to get to him. The shower is running and he is curled in a corner of it, hands up and covering his face. “Mulder?” she asks softly.

His eyes go wide at her voice, and he tugs her down beside him under the hard, hot spray, wrapping himself around her. She remembers in a cold surge: the slick tile underneath them, Mulder’s face pressed into the side of her neck as he blocked her from the muzzle’s trajectory, the sound of a gunshot. “Mulder,” she gasps to reassure them both, digging her fingernails into his arm to snap him out of it. “We’re not in Milford. You’re having a flashback. It’s okay.” Their mantra, now, with these fucking vivid nightmares.

He looks up at her in knee-jerk surprise, realization, water running down his face like bizarre tears. “Scully,” he says. Not a question. He closes his eyes against the weight of it, runs his fingers over her wrists like there should be rope burns there. This - the flashbacks, the nightmares, their reactions - is getting worse. It scares them both.

***

When they are approaching the time that the alien bounty hunter took her, the time that the Samantha clone made her first appearance, Mulder decides to go visit his mother. He rationalizes it as a safety precaution. Just in case. But he can’t let himself answer the questions that are poking in the back of his mind. _What would you do if Samantha did show up? Would you believe her or not? How would you find out the truth, if she is real?_

He takes Scully with him, for the sake of both of their sanity. It's a longer drive than they're used to, since they normally fly distances this long.

“We need a code word,” he says when they switch driving shifts at a rest area in Pennsylvania. “Just in case we aren’t… sure. Sometime.”

She gnaws on a thumbnail like she’s considering it; nods, finally, and looks like she is remembering all of the times that it wasn’t them. “Okay,” she says. “To say in situations when we’re separated and coming back together?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Or if there's any good reason to be suspicious.”

She scrunches up her nose in thought, taps her thumb against her lower lip once. “Do you have anything in mind?”

Thinking back to their customary phone greeting before the days of Caller ID, he offers, “Well, maybe we could just… _say_ that it’s us.”

Scully snorts. “Isn’t a little on the nose?”

“It’s less obviously a code then, like, some random word. I mean, what if the word came up in everyday conversation? What if the not-us had a reason to use that word? All I’m saying is that it’s logical to outright say it.” He’s quiet for a minute, and then adds, “If They’re listening in on us, we probably have worse things to worry about than Them knowing our code.”

She nods like it makes sense, smiles smally. “So, we just say ‘it’s me’?”

“Exactly.” He’d like to say he’d know if it wasn’t her, but he hasn’t before, has seen her dead and as a bloodthirsty ghost and as an OSS agent in 1939 and as a million hallucinations. And he couldn’t even tell when it really was her, not for weeks. He knows her well after so many years, but the mind is a tricky thing.

She nods, smiles smally. “Mulder it's me,” she says. “Just so you know.”

He smiles back, removes one hand from the wheel to take hers.

***

Unfortunately, Teena Mulder doesn’t seem very interested in her son’s partner.

(“Mom, this is Dana Scully,” he tries, and his mother shakes her hand politely and offers her something to drink. The three of them have an awkward cup of coffee in the kitchen where Teena asks some obligatory questions about work among other things. It is, all together, like his usual encounters with his mother, except for Scully staring at the table uncomfortably and rarely being acknowledged.)

Mulder wonders what she would say if she knew how much Scully means to him. If he outlined it out, tried to explain their relationship to each other, that Scully is different from anyone else he’d ever had a relationship with. If he even admitted that their relationship was more than a partnership.

But he doesn’t bother, and his mother leaves them alone in the house while she meets a friend for dinner ( _I'm so sorry, Fox, but these plans have been in place for months, and I just can't abandon a friend like this, and…_ )

Scully suggests they search it for some evidence of that night. He wants to snap something about how his mother has probably cleaned house in the time since then, but he doesn’t bother. They search the rooms from inch to inch, and end in the living room. Mulder stands in the shadow left by his sister and recaps the night to Scully in a low voice. It is strange to be back here, the memories from this room hovering in the back of his mind and threatening to spill loose. His sister screaming. She was only eight years old. He bites his lip hard enough to taste blood in an attempt to keep from sliding into another flashback.

They both had secrets; Scully hadn’t told him about the night her father died, and Mulder hadn’t told her about the night Samantha was taken. Now, it all spills over in the dark, because it’s easier than admitting things in the light.

They get a hotel in town, so Mulder doesn’t have to bother with explaining to his mother why he is sharing a bed with his partner. (“It's okay, Mom, really, we'll be heading out in the morning anyway…”) He holds onto Scully in the middle of the night, and wonders what it was like to be taken by someone who looked like him. It probably ranked right up there with the Modell and Van Blundht incidents.

He stops in to see his father, just in case Samantha would go there. Nothing there. Bill Mulder doesn't seem any happier to see him than his mother was, just as detached as always. Mulder sets his jaw and shuffles out of the hpuse after twenty minutes.

***

They get a new case: a young boy who disappeared from the park where he was playing with his siblings. An hour later, he showed up back in the park, limply flopped across the bottom of the slide with a slight protrusion on the back of his neck. The Baltimore police had referred his mother to the X-Files.

“The circumstances are very similar to when Samantha was taken,” Mulder tells Scully on the drive down. “Younger brother came to tell Jimmy that it was time to go, and found himself - according to his statement - on the ground unable to move, bright lights and Jimmy floating in the air. The only difference between the two cases is that Samantha wasn't returned after an hour.” He stops, the melancholy look on his face speaking volumes.

“And the chips are similar to our experience,” Scully says slowly. “Whatever our experience _was._ ”

“So the question remains… what's the difference here? Why do we have no memories of being abducted? And why wasn't Samantha returned years ago?”

“Maybe abduction cases are different based on the case,” Scully says. “Like in the other place.” She doesn't want to bring up their abductions. “If the abductions are… brief, that could explain how we were abducted.”

Mulder sighs. “None of this makes sense, Scully. The pieces don't fit. How we were taken the first time… why Duane Barry came for us… why Samantha’s case is the outlier here…”

“Maybe it has something to do with your father,” she says. “He could still be involved in this here. Maybe that's why you haven't seen Samantha in twenty-two years. All of the other abduction cases in the X-Files don't span that amount of time, do they?”

He shakes his head slowly. Contemplatively. This is a sensitive subject for both of them, after everything; she'd almost said no to the case for that very reason.

She touches his forearm comfortingly. “I think that all we can do right now is see what answers this case can bring us,” she says. “Maybe it's the key. Maybe this is how we find your sister. Or answers about our chips.”

“Could be,” he says shortly. Tensely - head ducked down, eyes focused firmly on the road. They pull up in front of the house, stopping the conversation in its tracks.

The mother, Vera Worth, looks relieved to see them. “We spoke on the phone, Agent Mulder,” she says. “You think you can find out who did this to Jimmy?”

“I hope so, Ms. Worth.” Mulder shakes her hand, introducing her to Scully. “I think it'd be best to start by just talking to the boys, see what they remember.”

She leads them through the cramped hallways of the small house. “Do you really think it was aliens?”

“It's a… possibility, based on our previous work,” Scully says.

“A likely one,” Mulder adds.

“And what about the, the… _thing_ in his neck? Is that how they find him?” The woman is on the verge of tears, smoothing her tangled ponytail frantically.

Scully feels the weight of her own chip, almost like a burning sensation. “We aren't sure,” she says.

Vera blinks heavily at them, eyes gravitating to the door of the living room where her sons are. “So, what does that…”

“Ms. Worth, I promise you that we will do everything we can to help your son,” Mulder says in that soft, soothing way he has. (It's one of the first things she remembers loving about him, his gentleness.)

Vera bites her lip, nods. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, I'll, um, introduce you to the boys, then.” She swallows and adds a quick, “Thank you” before heading into the room. They follow, awkward FBI-shadows in their black suits.

Jimmy is curled in the corner of the couch with a knit blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The younger brother is on the floor in front of the couch, cheek pressed to the side of the sofa. The TV casts colorful cartoon-based lights across their small faces. Vera kneels between them. “Jimmy, Miles…” she says, smoothing their hair. “Agent Mulder and Agent Scully are gonna ask you guys some questions, okay?”

Miles stares at them in little-kid awe, eyes stealing to Mulder's holster. Jimmy stares at the TV blankly.

“He hasn't been sleeping well,” Vera says by way of explanation for his listlessness, sitting beside him and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Nightmares.”

They exchange a look. “Nightmares?” Scully repeats.

“Really, really bad,” Jimmy says hoarsely. “It hurt.” He leans into his mother’s side.

“He woke me up with his screaming,” Miles adds, eyes still on the holster.

Vera rubs her hands up and down Jimmy’s bare arm. “He had a dream about the time he broke his arm, and swore he felt pain when he woke up.”

Their eyes meet again; Mulder nods to confirm that he has the same suspicions: that Jimmy’s nightmares seem to align somewhat with theirs.

They ask Jimmy and Miles a few more customary questions for an alien abduction case, and their answers are generic. Miles describes the light, his brother floating through the air, and his eyes widen in panic and he scoots over to hug his brother’s leg. Jimmy doesn’t remember anything. He emphasizes the nightmares, over and over again. “They’re so real,” he says. “Like it’s _really_ happening.”

***

They go to the park, the site of the abduction

“I think the nightmares are the key here, Scully,” Mulder says. “It’s the biggest similarity that we have between our case and another.”

“I’m not arguing that,” she says, kneeling next to the jungle gym to get a better view. “What I’m saying is that there’s inconsistencies. Between our case and your sister’s case and those kids in Oregon and Jimmy Worth. I’m saying that the facts don’t make sense. The pieces don't fit together.”

“Not necessarily. Those kids that were abducted in Oregon could've had chips and nightmares as well. They ended up in the woods, but we never found out why. And if you consider the factor that it was at night and they were all in their pajamas…”

Scully looks up at him from her spot on the ground. “You think the nightmares are what made them go into those woods?”

“They led them to the site of their abduction so they could be taken again. It makes sense, Scully. The chips are supposed to control the abductee. What better way than to distract them from the abduction?”

“But Theresa Nemmens never described any sensation like that,” she says. “And Billy Miles…”

“Scully, that wasn’t real,” he reminds her gently.

She stares up at him in astonishment. “What?”

“The car crashed, remember? The second half of that case… that was all in the other world. All we know is that those four kids were dead, and Peggy O’Dell and Billy Miles were in a car accident. We never talked to Theresa Nemmens… we don't even know that her name _is_ Theresa Nemmens.”

She grimaces as he helps her to her feet. “God, Mulder… it’s so hard to differentiate the facts in this universe from the other place.”

“I know,” he says. “It’s okay. I get confused all the time too.”

Scully nods. “So… do you think those kids had chips as well?”

“It’s possible. They didn’t appear on the autopsy report, but that easily could’ve been doctored from the public record, just like cause of death being exposure. And then there’s the thing we found in the corpse in Ray Soames’s coffin.”

“The implant,” she gasps. “Shit, they must’ve taken it from me at the hospital. Or I lost it in the crash. I kept it with me, I remember that. I didn't even _think_ about it, it's been so long.”

“It was in a different place, but it could be similar to what we have, and what Jimmy has,” Mulder says. “Their abductions… they were brief. Like ours, like Jimmy’s. We can only assume that they were abducted again…”

“And they were killed,” Scully finishes in a hushed tone.

They exchange a quiet look. “What if that’s Jimmy Worth’s fate?” she adds, not daring to add what they’re both thinking: _what if it’s ours_?

“Not all of those kids were dead, though,” Mulder says. “Billy Miles and Peggy O’Dell were alive.”

“They were immobile, and their brains were mush. It seems dangerous, Mulder, keeping the chip in.”

“But so does taking it out. What if we tell Vera Worth to take her son’s chip out, and she calls us again in a few months, hysterical because her son’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer? Or worse?”

“We can’t just tell her nothing,” Scully says. “That’s not fair. We’d want to know if it was Will… if we were in her position.” She turns red at her slip-up, head bent towards the ground.

Mulder sighs, tries not to linger on his nonexistent son that it is still too hard to forget. “I know. And I don’t want to tell her nothing. But I…”

“Mulder, look,” Scully interrupts, kneeling beside him. She scoops up a handful of something from the ground, and extends it towards him as she gets to her feet. It’s the same substance she found on the floor of the Oregon woods, right before they lost nine minutes and twenty-three years.

***

In the end, there is nothing to find at the park. In the end, they go back to the hotel to compile their evidence. The hotel is nearly empty, aside from one wild-eyed woman who nearly knocks Mulder down in the race to her car. “Sorry,” she mutters, dark hair flying out behind her as she twists away.

“You okay?” he calls out to her, but she doesn’t answer, slamming her car door behind her.

“She probably heard about the abductions,” Scully offers as the wheels screech against the pavement behind them. “Rumors like that tend to spook people. Remember the cockroach case in Miller's Grove?”

“Don't get started on that one again; I don't need another series of I-told-you-sos followed by two dozen Bambi jokes.” She smirks at him as he unlocks his hotel room and he smiles back.

They spread out all the information they have with them on one of the beds. Mulder had brought several files on abductions, including his sister’s and the sparse file from Oregon. “I wish I’d written more down,” he remarks. “I was so focused on… everything, afterwards, that I dismissed the case entirely and wrote up our experience instead.”

“I still have my report on my computer since it never caught on fire,” Scully says. “I never submitted it to Blevins. It won’t be much help, though, it’s all… skepticism.”

“I would think you’d regard that as useful, Agent Scully,” he teases.

“On most cases? Maybe. On this one? I can’t ignore the facts like I did last time.”

“You didn't ignore the facts,” Mulder says, chucking her playfully under the chin. She swats at him. “You just approached them from a different direction, and we met in the middle.”

“You're being awfully nice about my skepticism,” she says.

“You make me a whole person, remember? I have to be nice about it.”

They compare details from abduction cases for nearly an hour. Most of the unfamiliar abduction cases don't mention chips, but most of them were before Mulder's time on the X-Files, or had a missing body. (“I need you for your autopsies, Scully, you're the only thing keeping evidence from tampering by the government,” he says, quite serious, and she jabs him in the ribs.) In the end, the biggest anomaly is the Samantha case. It still makes absolutely no sense.

Eventually, Mulder dozes off across the foot of the bed. He wakes up when the other side rises with the absence of Scully's weight. “Where ya going,” he mutters lazily.

“To the second room the Bureau is paying for,” she says very matter-of-factly.

He raises his head to stare at her. “You're bluffing,” he says confidently. “Have you forgotten we live together, oh Nontraditional-Significant-Other?”

Scully has a terrible poker face. “Bureau policy prohibits…”

“ _Now_ you're worried about that?” He tugs her to him and kisses her.

“Okay, fine,” she says. “I was just making sure you were awake.”

“I'm awake,” he says into her mouth.

***

They meet with Vera and her two sons at a diner the next morning. Miles is tearing his way happily through a stack of sticky pancakes. Jimmy eats a biscuit quietly, sketching pictures on his napkin with a pen. Mulder cranes his neck to see; little alien heads, fangs bared menacingly.

“Sorry, I couldn't find a babysitter, Vera says, getting them another table and taking a seat across from them so she can watch her kids. “There was another nightmare last night,” she adds. “About when their dad left. Jimmy woke up convinced that he could stop him from going. I found him outside, the door slamming woke me up.”

Scully bites her lip. She hates this part, the giving of bad news, as much as he does.

“Evidence points to your son's abductors being of an extraterrestrial origin,” Mulder begins. It is almost too hot in the diner; he wants to loosen his tie and shed his jacket. He wants to give this worn-out woman some good news.

Vera fidgets, rolling and unrolling her sticky paper napkin ring. “Okay. And what about the chip?”

“We have reason to believe that removal of the chip would endanger your son worse,” Scully says solemnly. “That the results would be fatal.”

Vera’s lip trembles a little, eyes darting away from them and towards her sons. “So… what, either my son gets abducted again or dies because I save him from being taken again?”

“We don't necessarily know that he'll be taken again,” Mulder says. “There have been cases where abductions have been singular.” Their confusing mess of an abduction, for one.

Vera looks back at them, her expression furious. “So I just do nothing?”

Mulder shakes his head. “You still have my contact information, right?” She nods. “You call if anything goes wrong,” he says. “If Jimmy is taken again, or if there's any related activity. We'll come.” Next to him, Scully nods her consent.

Vera looks between them, nods as she rips the napkin holder into four even pieces. “It's not much,” she says quietly, “but it's something. Thank you, Agent Mulder, Agent Scully.”

They all three stand and shake hands. Vera goes back to the table to pay the bill, Miles hanging over her and whining about ice cream. Jimmy turns to look at Mulder and Scully warily. “Hi, Mrs. FBI Agent,” he says to Scully.

She kneels beside him, and Mulder is inevitably reminded of their son. “Hi, Jimmy,” she says. “What’re you drawing?”

Jimmy presses the tip of the pen into the napkin to create an ink spot. “These are the things that took me away,” he says. The napkin rips under the pressure.

Mulder feels a tap on his arm, and he turns to face Vera. “The nightmares,” she whispers. “Are they a result of his abduction?”

Scully is still talking to Jimmy, their heads bent together over the napkin. “We think so,” he says.

***

Vera Worth doesn't call in the following months, which gives Mulder some small degree of hope for that family. They take a few other cases, but none related to alien abduction.

The flashbacks continue, stack messily on top of each other like the world's worst game of Jenga. As April fades into May, Mulder gets paranoid, refuses to drink from the sink. Scully has the Gunmen do a test on the water. No signs of the drugs from the other place, but when Mulder comes home with a jug of water from the store, she doesn’t complain.

That night, she wakes from nightmares that taste like angry words and gunpowder to find the other side of the bed empty. Mulder’s in the kitchen, hunched foggily over a cup of coffee. “These flashbacks are turning you into an insomniac,” he says when he sees her, turning back to the coffeemaker to pour her a cup.

“And you into worse of one,” she replies, leaning into the tile. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” He offers a grimace-smile as he passes her a mug. “You didn’t shoot me this time.”

“Thank goodness for small favors.”

“What about you, you okay?”

She nods. “Just… worried about Melissa.”

He nods back like he understands - and he does, really. “Maybe we should go visit them for a little while,” he offers. “Make sure they’re okay. For our own sanity.”

It’s a perfect idea, on her end - Missy’s been suggesting that they should get together sometime soon - but possibly not the best on his. “Would that… work for you?”

Mulder shrugs. “It’s not… completely out of the _ordinary_. It’ll take me a while to drive up there; I can just stop in for a little while to make sure he’s alright, say I have a question.”

“What kind of question?”

“The usual family pain. About Samantha.”

***

_Mulder drops her off at home. They both have things to mourn, are headed off into the corner to lick their wounds privately. The dread builds in the pit of her stomach as the elevator ascends to her apartment; she does not want to go inside._

_The crime scene tape is gone, by now, but the dark stain at her threshold is still there. She has to pass over it to get into her home, her safe haven. She physically backs away, back hitting the wall with a thunk._ Yourfaultyourfaultyourfault, _she thinks. She doesn't realize she is crying until she feels the wetness on her cheeks._

“Dana?” Missy waves a hand in front of her face, eyes somewhere between amused and concerned. “Are you okay? You kind of zoned out for a minute.”

“I'm fine,” Scully says thickly, drinking her sister in. _She's not dead,_ she reminds herself. _It's just a goddamn flashback._ “I was just thinking.”

Melissa smirks. “What about?”

She makes a face, reverting back to childhood habits. “None of your business.”

Melissa sticks out her tongue, just as childishly, and grabs the remote. “You want to watch something?” she asks, switching on the TV. “ _Friends_ is on tonight.” She turns to face Scully.

_The mahogany lid of the coffee is thrown back, exposing the deceased to the world. Scully hates funerals, has hated them since she was a little girl._

_Her mother is crying behind her hand and her brother cinches his arm around her frail, shaking shoulders, and both of them stand apart from Dana, which she probably deserves. To carry this weight on her own. They haven't come right out and_ said _that it is her fault, but they must feel the inky blackness she feels towards herself. The guilt layered on top of the mourning._

_Her sister's face is expressionless, a crystal choker and her cross that matches Dana’s sharing the space around her neck. The wound in her forehead is almost well covered._

Scully lurches from the couch, knees hitting the tile of Melissa's bathroom hard as she vomits into the toilet.

“Dana?” Missy is panicked, kneeling beside her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says through her roughened throat, trying to smile. She takes the Kleenex Melissa offers to wipe her mouth. “Must've been something I ate.”

“You looked at me like I was a ghost,” Missy says, feeling her forehead. “You're freezing, Dana.”

“Food poisoning,” Scully insists. “Mulder drags me to the dingiest diners.”

Melissa shakes her head like she doesn't believe her, helping her up from the floor. “You know I'm hopeless with medical stuff, Day, what's the procedure here?”

“Just something to settle my stomach,” she says. “I'm fine, really.” She squeezes her sister's palm in relief before heading back into the living room. She'll be fine, really, she just has to keep reminding herself that none of this is real.

“I like your boyfriend,” Melissa says when she comes back to the couch, handing her a glass of ginger ale. “Dingy food poisoning diners or no.” Mulder and Melissa had met for the second-first time when he'd dropped her off on his way to his father’s, and they'd gotten into a ten minute conversation about auras.

Scully laughs at the generic term. It sounds strange in reference to them. “I’m not sure that’s a fitting term for Mulder, Missy.”

Melissa shrugs. “I like him. But I don’t understand why you guys call each other by your last names.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “We’re partners. At the FBI. And I have mentioned his first name, haven't I?”

Melissa asks some teasing questions about plans for the future, and Scully reverts to her childhood self again, retaliating with a plethora of adolescent antics she still remembers. They stay up late talking, like they used to when they were kids, and Scully keeps one hand on the inside of her jacket, where her gun is, but nobody comes all night.

***

His father looks surprised when he answers the door; he’s rarely visited since he left for Oxford, and when he had, he’d been more inclined to visit his mother. “Fox,” he says. “It’s… good to see you. Come in.”

Mulder enters awkwardly, feeling sixteen and annoyed to be spending a weekend with his father all over again. “Dad, I need to ask you about Samantha,” he says.

His father groans. “Must we drag this out over and over again, Fox? Why can’t you accept that she isn’t coming back?”

He holds back a grimace, more angry words. “I need to know about any involvement you might’ve had with the people who took her,” he says in a clipped tone. His father’s face turns bright red, a muscle memory of the rage he’d experienced in his childhood, so he plunges on. “I think that these same people have been targeting me and my partner. That they took us at one point before.”

Bill Mulder’s face morphs from an expression of rage to one of panic. “You were abducted?”

“We think we were… we found a chip…” Mulder raises a hand to the back of his neck.

“You can’t be here. You have to leave.” His father moves towards the door, forcing Mulder with him by trajectory alone.

He stumbles in an attempt to not move. “What… Dad…?”

“You need to go, Fox.” His father pushes him out the door.

Mulder grabs the door before he can close it. “No, not until you tell me what’s going on,” he snaps. There are too many things thrown into the balance to not get answers if his father knows what is happening. Samantha’s life, Scully’s life, their future…

“Trust no one, Fox,” Bill Mulder says in an eerie echo of Deep Throat. And then he slams and locks the door.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**eight.**

_1996_

“Your hair is longer,” he says.

She makes a mismatched picture, in pajamas with her hair twisted on top of her head and glasses sliding down her nose as she works on paperwork. “It wasn’t much shorter than this in 2016,” she says, not looking up. “It was longer than this when we were living in West Virginia.”

“It's longer than it was in 1996.” He kisses the space below her earlobe. “The first one, I mean.”

She shrugs. “I like it long.”

He kisses her hairline. “Me, too.”

She twists her head to look down at him. “If you like it, then why are you saying anything?” she asks. The sudden motion jars thick hair loose from her clip, hitting Mulder in the face.

He shrugs, pushing the strands behind her ear. “It's just different,” he says, because it's better than saying _your hair is shorter in the flashbacks._

“Not for where we came from,” she says.

“No, not there,” he agrees, tugging the laptop back onto his lap to resume the report. Scully offers him a smile before resuming their work, folding her leg underneath her.

Their caseload has been relatively light lately (Scully's insistence, following a two week trek in Washington State in search of Bigfoot that had been ridiculously rainy). Their flashbacks have also been relatively mundane lately, based off the lack of anything major happening in the early days of 1996. It's almost nice, this sequence of near-normal life.

(Mulder knows it won't last. He's trying not to dwell too much on that fact, but he knows.)

***

Vera Worth calls in a panic a few days later, because Jimmy has been abducted again. “He said something about a puppy down the street and took off running,” she says, near sobbing. “I ran after him and… I saw it. I saw the lights.”

They drive down there immediately, but Jimmy’s already been returned when they arrive, sitting on his mother's lap even though he seems a little too big for that. Scully checks him for any injuries while Mulder asks him questions about what he remembers. “All I remember is the puppy,” Jimmy says. “And then the lights, and then I was back here.”

“No… weird looking creatures or anything?” Mulder tries. Jimmy shakes his head solemnly.

It seems like a dead end, but Mulder tells Vera to call him if it happens again. “I'd try to keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn't go off on his own,” he says. “Maybe avoid the park where Jimmy was abducted?”

It's raining, lightly, and Vera clutches the stem of her umbrella so tightly that her knuckles turn white. “How do I make this stop?” she asks softly. “How do I prevent it, Agent Mulder?”

“I wish I knew,” he tells her, just as softly, just as regrettably. There is no way, at least not one he knows won't be fatal. If there is, he would've used it years ago.

***

_She’s trying to tell him not to shoot at Modell, but he can’t stop himself - not that he’d particularly want to. However the gun reacts to the pure oxygen, Modell is what scares him more in this room._

_The chamber clicks. No bullet._

_“Piece of cake,” Modell says. “Your turn.”_

_He can distantly hear Scully protesting through the rush in his head, calmly talking to him, trying to convince him not to. It’s easier than it should be. He wrenches the muzzle towards him and hears the same empty click against his skull._

_“No!” Scully screams, somewhere out of his line of vision. “Damn you! You bastard!” She reaches for the gun. “Mulder, hand me the g-”_

_He grabs her wrist and holds it back as he moves the gun back towards Modell. The other man looks at him funnily, like he can’t believe that Mulder thought he had the game figured out. A thought flies through his head, unbidden, and he tries to hold back from it even as he swivels the gun around to point at her. A small sound escapes his mouth, the only indication of how hard he is fighting this._

_Scully looks hurt, extraordinarily so. Where her voice had seemed muddled in his head before, like he was underwater, he can hear her clearly now. Modell is playing with him, twisting the knife so it hurts a little more._

_“Mulder, you don't have to do this,” she says. He’s still holding her wrist, unable to move his hand, and her pulse is a wild, live thing under his fingers. “You're stronger than this.”_

_“Your turn, Scully,” Modell says. “Got to play by the rules. Pull the trigger, Mulder.”_

_His finger tightens a little on the trigger against his will._

He wakes, gasping, from the dream, unsure if he’s actually fired the gun or not, until he sees Scully asleep beside him, hair hanging over her face as she sleeps. She’d dreamed the same scene the night before and woke up shouting his name.

Mulder rolls out of bed, pressing his palm into his forehead to remind himself that it wasn’t real. He’s awake now. Scully is fine. He brushes some hair back from her face as he tries to even out his breathing, remind himself that it was a nightmare even though he can still almost feel the cold sweat, the gunpowder on his hands.

“Pull the trigger, Mulder.”

He startles, reaching for the drawer in the bedside table where he keeps the gun immediately. The room is empty, quiet except for Scully’s breathing. He must still be asleep.

“Come on,” says the voice, a voice that is unmistakably Robert Patrick Modell, from somewhere in the room. “Pull the trigger, Mulder. She shot you, I read it in her files.”

Mulder scans the room frantically, finding only eerie shadows in the corners. He can't find the source of the voice. “This is a dream,” he says softly. “I’m hallucinating, I’m hearing things. This is not real.”

“Mulder?” Scully mumbles beside him. “What’s going on? Are you having a flashback?”

“Payback time... shoot the little spy!” Modell hisses, voice echoing off of the walls.

“Scully, do you hear that?” Mulder’s still frantically searching the room, looking for the source of the voice. _No, this-this is the real world_ , he tries to tell himself. _Modell doesn’t exist here. We’re safe here._

“Hear what?” Scully sounds concerned, sitting up and pushing her hair back. “Mulder, are you okay?”

He turns to look at her, and Modell is standing right behind her, grinning at him. “Scully!” he shouts frantically, turning away for a second to grab the gun. It seems too risky to turn away, like she might be dead or gone when he looks back, but she’s still there, staring at him with concern, when he turns around with his gun in hand. Modell is gone instead. Like he was never there.

“Mulder, what? What is it?” Scully is checking the room herself, looking in every direction, hand moving towards her own bedside table drawer.

He lets the gun drop on the sheets. “You didn’t… hear?” he says in disbelief.

Her hand goes to cup his face, thumbing his cheekbone. “Mulder, what is it?” she says again, softly.

“I saw Modell. Heard him talking to me.” He’s still scanning the room, not entirely sure Modell’s not going to appear out of nowhere. “I mean…” He breathes uneasily. “I dreamed that we were back in that room,” he says. “Another flashback. But when I woke up, I could still hear Modell. I saw him… here, in this room. Standing behind you.”

She whirls, tensing defensively. Nothing.

“I think…” she says finally. “I think it was just a flashback. A powerful one. Worse than usual.”

“I… yeah, you’re right. That’s probably it.” Mulder leans forward and kisses her forehead gently. The small reminder that she’s still here is comforting.

“We’re okay, Mulder,” she whispers. “We’re safe here.”

They may be okay, but they both know that they aren’t particularly safe. He sleeps uneasily that night: tense, worried, hand straying towards the drawer once or twice during the night.

The next day in the office, he looks up Robert Patrick Modell and finds a man living in Alexandria. He ducks out during lunch without telling Scully where he is going and goes to pay him a visit. But the man who opens the door looks and sounds absolutely nothing like the Modell he knew, the one he saw and heard in their bedroom. Some kind of bizarre hallucination is the only reasonable answer, and that's probably what scares him the most.

***

Things almost go back to normal in the subsequent months. There are flashbacks but they are fairly mundane, if not slightly ridiculous. (“Remember the case with the cats?” “Yeah. Why the hell did you take that case again?”) Life is almost normal - or as normal as it can be for them, at least.

Mulder being the eccentric investigator that he is, the phone has a tendency to ring in the middle of the night. When it does one night, Scully gives him a look strong enough to melt metal when he looks at her expectantly, so he sighs and answers it himself. “Mulder.”

Vera Worth is on the other, voice tight and terrifying. “You lied to me, Agent Mulder.”

He blinks in sleepy confusion. “Vera? What happened?” he asks, sitting up in bed and kicking at the covers.

“You told me you would _help_ my son, and then your people took him!”

He almost drops the phone. “Wait, wait, Vera, what's going on? Was Jimmy abducted again?”

Scully is fully awake now. She lifts her head from the pillow, mouthing _what's wrong?_

“Yes,” she near-growls. “I didn't call you, since you didn't find anything last time and he was returned within the hour. I took him to the hospital after, just to check, thought maybe there was something you and your partner couldn't see, and _your people_ came in flashing their badges and took my son away from me!” Her voice cracks, and she starts to cry softly.

Mulder is frantic, shoving the sheets aside to get out of bed. “I had nothing to do with that, Vera, I swear. Did they say where they were taking him?”

“No,” she whispers brokenly, voice cracking on a sob. “They said he needed to go into quarantine. They said he was a danger to the population, that he was sick and I couldn't see him. They wouldn't answer my questions.”

He yanks open the dresser too hard, almost sending the drawer sprawling on the floor. “I'm going to find him, okay? I'm going to bring him back to you.” Whatever has happened to Jimmy Worth, he probably isn't sick. That much seems clear.

“You son of a bitch,” Vera snaps, tears leached out of her voice. “You're the reason he's gone! How the hell can you help?”

“I promise I'll bring him back,” he repeats before hanging up and dropping the phone on top of the dresser with a clatter.

“Mulder?” Scully asks. She's already out of bed, sitting on the edge of it. “What's going on?”

“Jimmy Worth was taken into quarantine after his latest abduction,” Mulder says, shoving his feet into shoes. “By the Bureau.”

She gets to her feet and heads for the closet. “Do we know where? Or why?”

“No,” he says. “I'm calling Skinner to find out.”

“Mulder, they'll never be convinced to let him come with you,” she says.

“I wasn't planning on asking.”

She looks at him, blue eyes firm. “You'll be arrested.”

“So I'll be arrested. That's not more important than keeping a seven-year-old boy from a life of experiments. No, wait - eight. He'd be eight now.” He tries not to note the similarities, but it is impossible. Scully’s already noticed it, her eyes turning soft. “I don't think he's sick,” he adds. “There's been no previous occurrences of viruses, not during my time on the X-Files. I think this is a very professional kidnapping.”

“I think you're right,” Scully says softly. “But how are we going to save him?”

“Break him out,” Mulder says firmly, grabbing his gun from the bedside table. I'll go in. You wait outside in the car, in case I don't come out.”

***

Mulder's broken into enough places with the Gunmen to be able to do it well. He sneaks in the fire exit of the government facility where they've taken Jimmy by wedging a rock into the door before it closes and steals down a near-empty hall, ducking around corners and jumping at sudden sounds. (The Gunmen had managed to get the information on Jimmy for them, and are constructing false identities for the little family now. Scully had called Vera back and managed to convince her to bring Miles to the Gunmen’s and wait for them there, that she could trust them.) There's a set of keys hanging on a hook near the end of the hall. Mulder finds the room number that matches the one Langly had given him and tries the keys until he finds one that fits.

Jimmy looks incredibly small curled in the corner of the room they have him in, a hospital gown hanging off of his bony frame. “You're the FBI agent from before,” he says when Mulder enters, curling further into the corner. “With Mom. At my house. Who asked about the lights.”

Mulder nods, shutting the door gently and crouching in front of him. “I'm going to get you out of here, okay?” he says. “I’m gonna take you back to your mom.” Jimmy looks eager at these words, scrambling to his feet. “Okay,” Mulder says. “We're going to have to run, okay?”

Jimmy nods, nibbling at his overlong nails. “Will you have to shoot your gun?”

Mulder gulps, getting to his feet. “No, I don't think so, buddy.” The boy nods, looking nervous. He clamps onto the tail of Mulder's shirt. “Stay behind me, and don't stop running no matter what,” Mulder says. “There's a woman waiting outside who will help us. She's the FBI agent who came with me to your house before. Remember her?”

“I do, but… you're gonna stay with me, right?” Jimmy asks, looking worried. “I don't wanna go out by myself.”

“I'll do my best, but I want you to keep running even if I don't. Look for the woman outside. She has red hair. She'll keep you safe.”

He nods, twisting the hem of Mulder's shirt in his hands, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You ready?” Mulder whispers, and Jimmy nods. Mulder counts off in his head before shoving the door open and sprinting down the hallway.

To his credit, Jimmy manages to keep up with his long strides fairly well, hands slipping on the edge of his shirt as they run. Someone tries to step in front of them, and Mulder shoves him hard, hitting him in the face. Jimmy makes a small squeaking sound behind him, but they both keep running. Mulder shoves a door to the outside open roughly, a combination of cold air and an alarm blaring shocking him into focus. The fire alarm, dammit, he'd forgotten. The keys are still in his pocket, jangling together; he keeps them to avoid leaving behind fingerprints. Scully is waiting by the car anxiously. The driver's door is hanging open. When they get there, Jimmy breaks away from Mulder and throws his arms around Scully. He's probably tired and scared and wanting his mother. Scully smooths his hair a little. As Mulder rounds the car to climb into the driver's seat, he can hear her talking to Jimmy softly: “It's okay, sweetie, it's okay. We're going to get you back to your mother and brother, okay? But you need to get into the car.” They both climb in the back, Jimmy huddling close to her in fear. As soon as the door closes, Mulder hits the gas, the alarm’s beep still echoing in his ears.

***

As soon as they get past the Gunmen’s security system, Jimmy breaks away from Scully to hug his mother, who is waiting with Miles just inside the door. She kneels on the ground to embrace him, tears spilling over into his hair as she rocks him back and forth, chanting: “You're safe now, baby.” (Scully has to blink back emotional tears of her own. Mulder reaches down and squeezes her hand.)

Vera finally stands, holding her son's hand and extending her other towards Mulder. “You said you'd bring him back,” she says. “I didn't believe you. Thank you, Agent Mulder. Agent Scully. For… all of this.” She waves her hand at the three IDs sitting on top of the hastily packed bags in the corner.

Mulder shakes her hand. “You'll need to lay low,” he says. “Remember my number and call me if anything goes wrong. Me or Scully or the guys will do our best to help you.” Scully nods her affirmation from beside him. “I'm so sorry for everything that's happened,” he adds.

“You don't owe me an apology, Agent Mulder. You saved my son, my family… we owe everything to you.” She wipes tears away with the back of her hand, and Jimmy hugs her around the waist. Miles scrambles over to join in the hug, looking cautiously between Mulder and Scully and the trio in the corner.

All that Scully can say is, “Good luck.” She's been on the road before, understands the weariness and the fatigue and worry it brings. She's wondered, before, how it would've been different if William had been with them. Much of the stress would've remained, she's sure, but she thinks she would've been happier. If she'd been able to save her son along with Mulder the way that Vera Worth is saving hers.

Jimmy gives them both a hug before they leave, squeezing her tightly. “Thank you,” he says shyly. Mulder offers him a smile and tousles his hair.

The Gunmen order pizza after the Worths leave, and they stay to eat while Scully tries to lower her frantic pulse. The sound of the alarm is still echoing in her ears, egging on her panic. She has to remind herself that they are out of danger.

Of course, she is immediately proven wrong.

They drive home a couple of hours later, both exhausted and on edge. As soon as they step out of the car, headlights light up out of nowhere, creating a white space in Scully's vision. Behind the light somewhere, a voice shouts, “Federal agents, put your hands up!”

She looks up at Mulder in panic as she raises her hands slowly. He is pale,chewing his bottom lip nervously, looking ahead at the agents running towards them instead of her. They are routinely handcuffed as someone reads off their rights. One of them is a panicked young agent she recognizes from a larger assignment she and Mulder had been put on; he mutters, “Sorry, Agent Scully,” before leading her gently to the car. Neither of them put up a fight. Her stomach is churning hard enough to make her want to vomit.

They are put in separate cars, which only makes her anxiety increase. The feeling of having her arms pinned behind her again is verging on more flashbacks, and she cannot have a flashback now. She bites her lip, hard, and tries to focus. _Skinner will get us out,_ she tells herself. And then she remembers Jimmy Worth, Duane Barry, and the fact that they are federal prisoners. The conspirators inside the government can very easily make them disappear. They have them. She and Mulder can't escape.

***

She's not allowed to see Mulder.

She wouldn't be so panicked if she thought this was a normal stay in prison. When she'd been sent to prison to protect Mulder, it'd been different. She'd felt safe then, at least - concerned, on edge, irritated, but safe. Now all she can think about it what comes next. The likelihood that they'll “disappear”, that their pictures will make the rounds on the news as federal fugitives again and will fade out eventually. In the meantime, they'll be taken again, by the people who sent Duane Barry for her and someone else for Mulder.

Skinner visits her. “Agent Scully, this is all a misunderstanding,” he tells her. “I'm trying to clear this up.”

“With all due respect, sir, you're fighting a battle you can't win,” she snaps, slouching in the hard plastic chair, very near defeat. “They're going above our heads. I can verify that the boy Mulder and I broke out was the victim here. There was no reason for him to be in quarantine, and yet they separated him from his mother and brother.”

Skinner chews his lip nervously. “That may be true, but if it is, you and Agent Mulder completely took the wrong approach. You should have…”

“We _had_ no other approach to take. Sir, if I know these people, I know that they weren't going to let that boy go. And no matter how hard you try to get me and Mulder out, they're not going to let us go either.” She lifts her chin in pure, unadulterated defiance. Skinner nods once like he understands. He looks troubled.

“I want to see Mulder,” she adds, softer. Moment of weakness. Skinner nods again and smiles shakily at her before he leaves.

They're allowed to see each other the next day - in a private room, even. She supposes there isn't much chance of them escaping. As soon as the door is closed, they wrap themselves around each other. “Miss you,” Mulder mumbles into her hair.

Scully doesn't say anything, just presses her face against his scratchy, drab prison clothes.

“Skinner thinks he can get us out,” he continues.

“We're not getting out,” she says. “They're going to take us, Mulder. It's the perfect setup, they'll send us to another prison and release some bullshit statement about how we were murdered because of our background as FBI agents. Meanwhile, we'll likely be taken to wherever Duane Barry was planning on taking us, wherever Jimmy Worth was supposed to go.”

He just holds her tighter. “I'm so sorry, Scully.”

“You didn’t have a choice,” she whispers. “This is their fault, not ours.”

“It's a little bit ours. When you play with fire, you expect to get burned.”

The guard on the other side taps at the door. “I love you,” Mulder says softly, almost unintelligibly, against her temple before letting her go. Scully watches him leave, something cold rattling loose somewhere inside her chest. How long do they have left?

***

_The memories come back in flashes: Mulder and Duane Barry's voices somewhere above her, Mulder with the smoking man, Mulder's face in the bright white place she associates with pain. Her mind is muddled with the images, head buzzing. Her mother doesn't look like she believes her when she tells her that Mulder has betrayed her, and that's probably the most insulting. “But Fox didn't…” she tries._

_“He killed one daughter, Mom. Are you going to let him kill another?” Scully bites out, hands clamping around the butt of her gun._

_This shakes her mother, shifting something on her face. “He's looking for you,” she says softly. “He's concerned…”_

_“It's an act,” Scully insists. “He'll kill me, Mom.”_

_Someone is insistently knocking on the door, repeatedly. Her mother strokes her hair. “I need to go see who that is, Dana,” she says. “You stay here and try to calm. I won't let anyone hurt you.” She tucks the knit blanket around her daughter's shoulders before leaving the dark den._

_Scully presses her forehead against the upholstery, trying to make the onslaught of images stop. They keep coming, more and more aggressive. She's so confused, so erratic._

_Her mother's voice blends with another as background noise. It's suddenly familiar - the cadence, the tone. She doesn't know for sure until he says, “I need to see her.” It sounds sincere, but she's sure that the sentiment behind it is entirely insincere._

_She can hear her mother's pleas for Mulder to go away as she creeps towards the lit front of the house with her gun drawn. She's doing this for herself, for Melissa. For her dog, absurd as it sounds._

_“Where is she?” Mulder asks, and Scully rounds the corner and aims the gun at him._

Scully jolts awake, banging her head against the small room's concrete wall. It takes her a minute to remember where she is, and she burrows into the corner of her bed with the thin blanket around her. _Not real,_ she reminds herself. But this nightmare of being stuck in a prison cell is entirely real.

“Fuck,” she whispers, huddling against the wall. Even sleeping doesn't feel safe anymore. Nothing feels safe.

***

Mulder wakes from a sequence of nightmares: his mother nearly dead on a hospital bed, the screams of his sister's clone as he faded into unconsciousness, X’s blood on his apartment floor. He stands shakily and starts for the door before remembering where he is. There's nowhere to go to walk off a nightmare - or a flashback.

The images of his mother after her stroke are especially daunting. There is no guarantee it hasn't happened again, and there is no way he can check on her. Not while they're stuck in here. It's several steps up from the military prison he'd been in, but it's still prison. And Scully's fear that this is a well-masked essential kidnapping hangs over him like a dark cloud. They are more or less trapped, unable to do anything or help anyone. If Samantha is alive, he won't be able to find her.

The door creaks open suddenly, startling him. “Rise and shine, Agent Mulder,” the guard says. “You're free to go.”

Mulder sits up on the bed, shoving the thin blanket aside. “The charges have been dropped?”

“Reexamination of the security footage shows that you weren't the one who broke the kid out after all.” The man sounds almost bored. “You'll be returned to your position at the FBI with a slap on the wrist. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.”

“And my partner?” Mulder blurts.

The guard nods.

His relief is palpable - they’re getting out, they’ll be okay. He steps outside the cell uneasily, unsteady on his feet. “Sir, could I ask a favor and borrow your phone?” he asks. He wants to check on his mother.

***

They immediately go to the Gunmen’s after, having figured out who would have the capabilities to alter the evidence. Scully full-on hugs Frohike. “I'm not sure how the hell you guys managed that,” she says, “but thank you.”

Frohike looks bewildered. “Can't reveal trade secrets.”

“Trade secrets or not, we definitely owe you,” Mulder chimes in, clapping Byers on the shoulder.

Byers manages to look modest and slightly embarrassed. “We figured that, based on the information you've given us, they had more nefarious plans for you than federal prison,” he says. “And there wouldn't be any way of proving that the little boy was unlawfully detained. So we figured an altering of the evidence would be a good approach.”

“I've been wanting to try that for a while, actually,” Langly says proudly.

“Although I doubt we would've gotten away with it if your boss hadn't pushed to review the tapes,” Frohike adds. “He filed for an appeal to get you guys out, according to our sources.”

Mulder and Scully exchange a look. “So Skinman’s on our side,” he says with a grin. “That's a relief.”

“Mulder, we can't treat him any different like we…” She stops herself before she says _like we did in the other place_. No one knows about it, and they'd like to keep it that way; it sounds absolutely crazy even to them sometimes. “It could be a trick,” she says instead. “We need to be careful.”

Mulder nods. She suspects they'll both be a lot more careful after this no matter what the situation.

“So!” Frohike says loudly to break the mood. “Shall we celebrate release from incarceration? Langly picked up a couple six packs when we heard the news.”

“Thanks, but I'm ready to head home and sleep in my own bed for once,” Scully says. It's been long enough that she is craving home desperately, the way she used to after long and exhausting cases. Who knew she'd ever call Mulder's rattly little apartment home?

They're home within the hour, sleeping through the next day, both laden with exhaustion. Mulder mumbles some things about his mother and Samantha and Jeremiah Smith in his sleep, but it is otherwise peaceful.

Scully wakes sometime in the evening and heads for the kitchen to find something to eat. She stops dead in her tracks when she sees a peeling cardboard box sitting on the inside of the door, on the mat she'd bought herself after moving in. It is addressed to _Dana Scully_ in black Sharpie, her former address written below and neatly crossed out in a way that leaves it legible.Horror runs cold through her blood as she flips open the lid and rummages through: it's a box full of the false reports she'd made on Mulder. It sends a clear message: _you got away this time, but we know where you are and we know what you're doing._

She rides the elevator down to the basement and tosses the box into the furnace, feeling absurdly like Phillip Padgett as she watches the entire thing smolder.


	9. Chapter 9

**nine.**

Melissa is the only one who actually  _ knows  _ they are living together - Scully has managed to divert all her visits with her parents to their house (“Are you embarrassed of my place, Scully?” “ _ Our  _ place, Mulder, and no… I'm just not in the mood to explain why we're living together to my parents.”) but Missy had insisted on coming over and having coffee sometime last spring so Scully had disclosed her new address and made her swear not to tell. (“As a fellow older sibling, I can disclose that there is no way she's not telling.” “Shut up, Mulder.”) Mulder isn't actually sure  _ when  _ she is planning to tell them, but he's guessing that she didn't have Thanksgiving in mind, when Melissa accidentally slips up and mentions “Dana and Fox’s place”. (He swears that she calls him that just to irritate him, seeing as how Scully had introduced him as Mulder in this universe.) Scully’s father immediately gives him a look that makes him want to melt on the spot, followed by a similar look from Bill Jr. Meanwhile, Scully is giving Melissa a nearly identical glare. Maggie doesn't say much in the moment, but she kisses Mulder on the cheek at the door and not-so-subtly slides marriage into the conversation, smiling in a way that manages to be encouraging encouraging and encouraging and threatening all at once. She'd probably buy him the ring. 

“God, remind me never to do that again,” Scully groans into his shoulder when they've finally gotten back to their couch. 

“Um, honey? Christmas is coming soon, so I think you'll have to.” Mulder scoots out of the way of the jab aimed towards his ribs for the  _ honey.  _ “If it makes you feel any better, holidays with my family would be worse,” he says. “It'd be a series of coldness between my parents and out of context questions about our lives. Also, I can't remember the last time I brought someone home for the holidays. Or…  _ ever  _ doing that, in fact.”

Scully sighs. “I'm _so_ incredibly grateful, that I _have_ a family to embarrass me at holidays… but I'd forgotten how _confrontational_ it could feel at times.” She turns her face into into the leather back of the couch. "So this is normal? I should be grateful that my family's back and can torture me?"

"Exactly," Mulder says, rubbing his warm palm up and down her bare arm.

"Mmm. Well, I guess that's what I'm thankful for," she says into the couch. "What are you thankful for?"

He trails his fingers along her cheek. "This. You. The chance to start over, have a good life with you." 

She turns her face toward him slowly, offering him a small smile, verging on the edge of a full-out beam. "You're a sap," she says, kissing him. "I'm thankful for you, too." 

What he's thinking, what's been toying over and over in his mind for months now, is right on the tip of his tongue.  _ I want to have a baby _ . And he does - is saddened by the experience he'd completely missed, excluding a few days he'd spent with his son. But it's entirely the wrong time. They've been living on the edge of a cliff since their return from the other place, always scared, panic strengthened by the stunningly vivid flashbacks. (He'd woken one night in October to see Gerry Schnauz leaning over a sleeping Scully, ice pick in hand. He'd managed to stifle his scream, and when he'd looked up, he'd been gone. Scully slept through the entire thing; he hasn't had the heart to tell her.) They have chips in their neck and are undoubtedly on the conspirators' bad side; the Duane Barry incident and their arrest in the spring still loom large in their minds. 

(The flashbacks have slowed, become less terrifying through the tail end of October and the entirety of November. They've been happy. Here, on the couch with Scully turning into him, seems like a perfect time to say it. He doesn't know how Scully will react, but he wants to know. Wants to know what she'll think of him asking.)

_ I want to have a baby _ , he thinks. But the words won't jar loose. 

"Happy Thanksgiving," he says instead against Scully's cool forehead.  

***

_ 1997 _

She presses her forehead against the porcelain as the nausea subsides, swallowing hard against the burn in the back of her throat. Leaning back against the wall, she shoves sweaty strands over hair away from her face. Moonlight streams through the tiny window, probably only making her paler. 

“I’m sorry… but you’ve got something I need.”

Scully looks up to find Betts’s swelled face staring at her. She yelps, scrambling back over the tile and yanking her hands up over her face. She poises to kick out at him, but when she lowers her hands, he's gone. Or more likely, he was never there. 

Her stomach rolls with returning nausea, and her fingers grip on the sink as she pulls herself to her feet, stumbling a little. In the mirror, her face is white, and blood is sliding slowly out of one nostril. 

_ Shit.  _ She grabs Kleenex and presses it to her nose. Her reflection stares back at her, pallid with the dark hint of crimson against her upper lip. She twists the Kleenex in her hands, swallowing hard. 

***

She has three nosebleeds nosebleeds in the next week.

She prays the second time, tries tries to wipe the blood from her palms.

The third time, she makes a doctor's  appointment, hands shaking on the dialpad badly enough that she dials the wrong number on the first call. 

(Somewhere distant, she thinks,  _ why can't we catch a fucking break? _ Is their life destined to be a long string of pain in any universe?)

She has no idea how to tell Mulder. 

***

She's been tired lately, yawning and slumping against the wall after an autopsy. Mulder teases her about light cream cheese and she offers him a small smile but doesn’t retaliate. As soon as they get back to the hotel, she crawls under the comforter, and he slides in beside her and is overwhelmingly reminded of the second time in Oregon, right before he was gone. She wedges her head under his chin, mumbling, “Thanks. Sorry I'm such a drag.”

“It's okay,” he says, brushing his lips over her hairline. “This case  _ has  _ been a little exhausting.”

“No, it's not that,” she says roughly. “I've just been… feeling crummy lately.” There is a pause in her voice, like she is going to say more, but she stops mid-sentence, and he feels something wet and warm against his neck.

“Shit,” Scully says miserably, flailing a little as she shoves the comforter aside and grabs a handful of tissues from the bedside table, pressing them to the crimson underside of her nose. 

Mulder brushes his fingertips over his neck, and they come away red. A wash of nausea crashes over him. “Scully…” he starts.

Her eyes are closed, fingers whitening as she wrenches the Kleenex between them. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. But I saw something in the bathroom at home… Leonard Betts… right before I got a nosebleed, and it's been happening since then.”

He climbs out of bed and pulls Scully into his arms, hugging her as close as possible. 

“Mulder…” she sighs into his neck. 

“No,” Mulder says, holding her even closer, bunching the back of her shirt in his hands.

She swallows, forehead resting against his neck. “Mulder, we have to consider…” 

“ _ No _ ,” he repeats. “Scully, no.”

Her fingers run over the chip in his neck, and his eyes lighten, like he's discovered some great treasure. “It could be another flashback,” he says, latching onto the idea. “A severe one. Like when I saw Modell. We don't know that it…”

“Mulder,” she whispers. “Our flashbacks have been separate. I didn't see Modell that night. And we may have been hurt from them once or twice, but never like this. Never repeatedly, in a pattern resembling that of my stay in an alternate universe. There's never been any  _ physical  _ evidence of them.” The rust-red stains on her palms speak volumes; she spreads them wide for emphasis.

“It's not fair,” he says, like a child. “You kept the chip in. We kept the chips in. We did everything we were fucking supposed to.”

“If Duane Barry was real, then this…”

He kisses her before she can finish, desperately, tugging her closer with handfuls of her jacket. She wraps her arms around his neck, surging closer. “Scully…” he whispers into her mouth. 

She pulls away, running her fingers over his cheek. “Mulder, listen,” she says softly. “I've made an appointment for Monday. There's a good chance that it'll be nothing, okay? We'll have to wait and see before we get…” She swallows roughly. “...get too worried.Okay?”

He rocks his forehead against hers, eyes closed. “Scully,” he whispers. 

“Yes?” she whispers, eyes closing.

“Marry me.”

Her eyes open. “Oh, Mulder,” she says sadly.

“I know, I know. Trust me, I know.” He looks awkward, like he wants to say something more but can't find the words. He brushes some hair away from her face.

She smiles at him, fingers brushing at his hairline. “Okay.”

He blinks like he didn't expect her to say yes. “Okay?”

“Mulder, I've known you for over 25 years.”

“Hell doesn't count.”

“It counts.” She cups the back of his neck, rising up to kiss his forehead gently. “We'll have to figure out something at work. Skinner might be able to either hide it or give us some leeway… or, no, maybe the Gunmen could alter public records… or they might find out and we won't be able to work together anymore. I don't think that matters as much in the long run, anymore.” She sniffs, dragging her fingertips under her nose for any extra blood. “Yes, Mulder. Yes, I'll marry you.” 

He laughs a little, looking incredibly overwhelmed. “I wish you'd said yes the first time I asked you.”

“In 1998?”

“Mmhmm. We could've saved a lot of time.”

“There's a lot of things I wish I'd said yes to, Mulder.” She takes his hand and pulls it into hers. 

“There's a lot of things I wish I'd asked, Scully.” He squeezes her fingers. 

She rubs his thumb with hers. “It's going to be okay.”

“I know,” he lies. 

***

They're kind-of-sort-of engaged, but they don't actually talk about it. They finish up the case on Saturday and fly home, Mulder holding her hand on the plane, stroking her ring finger over and over.

She vomits Sunday morning. He makes her breakfast that she is in no mood to eat, and she flashes back to Penny Northern’s bedside and takes a long shower before joining him on the couch, nose and eyes red. He drapes a blanket over her shoulder. “How do you feel?” he asks softly.

“Crummy.” She curls into the corner of the sofa. “I'll know for sure tomorrow.”

Mulder nudges her sock foot with his. “There's no waiting period in Virginia,” he says softly.

Scully raises an eyebrow. “Are you saying…”

“Let's take the day off work tomorrow and get married. Your appointment isn't until the afternoon, right?”

“Right, but Mulder… if we get bad news tomorrow, do you really want to associate our anniversary with that?” She bites her lip. 

“No, look at it this way. If we get good news tomorrow, we'll always be able to remember it on our anniversary.”

She smiles in spite of herself, ducking her head. Her hair, recently cut neatly around her shoulders, slices down across them neatly. “I never told you this,” she says softly, pulling Mulder's hand into her lap. “In the other place, Mom left me their wedding rings. Hers and Dad's. When I came home, I was going to… give one to you.”

Mulder looks shocked and overwhelmingly happy all at once. “You wanted to marry me?”

“Well, I wasn't sure how you'd feel about _ marriage,  _ per say, but I thought I would just see if you wanted the ring and go from there.”

He squeezes her hand. “Little bit of improv?”

“Exactly,” she says.

He squeezes her hand again, and she smiles. They are getting married tomorrow. It's a little corny, at least to their standards, but she'll allow herself this, at least. She deserves it.

***

Sometime in 1996, he'd thought he'd have to marry her if he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. The idea was bizarre - the closest he's ever actually come to marriage was Diana - but not entirely horrifying. At that point in time, he'd thought that marriage was still a condition of Scully's future - she'd only ever mentioned wanting to get married once, early on in their partnership, she'd always talked about her desire to have kids more. Later on, marriage had seemed to matter less to both of them. The last time he'd thought about it was the night before he'd found out he had to leave, the night with William. It's been a void subject in his mind since.

(But he would've married her in a heartbeat if she'd said yes in 1998. He'd give her the fucking moon if he could.)

Scully looks a little bemused when he goes out Monday morning and returns with takeout bagels and two wedding bands, some matching simple, pale gold. “It's silly, but indulge me, Scully,” he says.

She takes one in her hand. “Even if someone is able to cover for us at the FBI, people would notice if we started wearing bands.”

“Scully, I could come in wearing a fruit basket on my head, and those people wouldn't notice.” She kisses him before he can finish. 

***

The new weight is unfamiliar on her hand, but not in a bad way. She grabs his hand and presses a kiss half against his finger and half against his own ring as they huddle together on the steps of the courthouse. The chill of February bites through the jacket she'd stolen from his dresser drawer that morning. He brushes her hair back and kisses her forehead. They lean against each other, and talk in whispers, as if everyone is listening and they have to hide.

She tries not to tell him  _ you could lose me again so I'm going to do my best to make sure you never have to, I don't want to lose you, I don't want to leave you _ . Instead she just tells him, “I love you”, which is probably fitting since it's their wedding day, and he pulls her closer, his fingers pressed into their familiar spot at the small of her back.

“I'm nervous,” he says into her hair.

“Try not to think about it, okay? It'll all be over in a few hours.” 

They drive to the hospital silently, Mulder turning the wheel methodically and Scully twisting her ring absently. He asks if she wants him to come back with her, and she says no. She's never liked to get bad news with other people, always wants to absorb it before having to share her grief with other people. And if it is indeed bad news, she'll need time, at least, to compose herself before she tells him. The weight of his grief will almost be heavier than hers, and she selfishly doesn’t want to carry it.

Mulder kisses her fingers, brushing over the cool metal of the ring. “It'll be okay,” he says, although he doesn't sound like he believes that at all.

He watches her go back, the door slamming shut behind her. 


	10. Chapter 10

**ten.**

He buys her flowers. It feels like admitting something is wrong, but something could be wrong. Everything has seemed too real, these past few days. It’s overwhelming. There’s probably nothing wrong, but it could be something. It could be…

She comes out of the back with a solemn look on her face. He goes to meet her. “Scully?” he whispers softly, reaching down to take her hands.

She looks down at their joined hands in confusion, but not rejection, and then back up at him solemnly. “They found a, uh, nasopharengeal mass. A small growth between the superior conchea and the sinoidal sinus.”

“A growth?” he repeats, feeling numb. 

“A tumor.”

A tumor. Horror washes over him like the crushing weight of the tide, and he stares into her ocean-blue eyes like he might fall away otherwise.  _ Not again _ , he thinks.  _ Not again, not again. _ “Is it operable?” he stammers.

“No.”

“But it’s treatable,” he says, hoping for something, anything.

She sighs, avoiding his eyes, squeezing his hands. “The truth is that the type and placement of the tumor make it difficult, to the extreme.”

He shakes his head involuntarily. “I refuse to believe that, I…”

“For all times I have said that to you, I am as certain of this as you have ever been.” She squeezes his hands again, her palms too cold against his. “I have cancer. It is a mass on the wall between my sinus and cerebrum. If it pushes into my brain statistically there is about zero chance of survival.”

She is blunt, but gentle, and he is not going to let this happen to her. “I don't accept that. Th-there must be some people who have received treatment for this, we… can…” 

“Yes, there are,” she says, letting go of his hands. “Do you remember the MUFON group? The women who were sick?”

“I…” He chews his lip nervously. “I think so, but they were… that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” 

Her brow furrows in confusion. “Not that long ago, it was last year,” she says. “I think we might find some answers there. It’s in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I’m ready to go when you are.”

“I… we can go now, if you want,” he says. Anything to help her. Anything to save her. 

She squeezes his upper arm, guiding him gently towards the door. “That’s a good idea. I want to do this while I still have some strength left.”

The way she says it makes him want to cry, and he is going to kill whoever did this to her. They leave the hospital together, walking to where he parked their car. Did they come together? They must have. 

“Scully?” he says. “Did we… this has happened before, hasn’t it? You being sick?”

She turns to him, eyes wide with concern. “Mulder, what are you talking about? Are you okay?”

He shakes his head as if he can shake the strange memories out, this confusing buzz in his head. “I’m fine, Scully,” he says.

***

Scully twists her ring the entire time she waits for her results. When she was younger, she'd tried on her mother's wedding ring to see what it felt like and had disliked the bulky weight on her finger, putting it back on the bedside table from some combination of discomfort and fear of losing it. When Mulder had brought home the rings, she'd been worried that she wouldn't want to wear it, but that's not the reason she's been obsessively fiddling with it. It almost reminds her that Mulder is here, waiting for her, that she's not alone, whatever happens. 

_ We've gotten cheesy in our old/young age,  _ she thinks wryly. 

She realizes, suddenly, that if she dies she goes back to a world where everyone and Mulder are dead (if Mulder’s correct). At least she'll have these four years to think about, if nothing else.

The doctor enters then, and Scully jumps a little. “Well, Dana, we have your results,” she says. She is smiling. 

Scully crosses her ankles, letting go of the ring in an almost firm manner aimed at herself. “The MRI was clear?” she asks cautiously. She doesn't want to dare to hope.

The doctor nods. “Although your symptoms were pretty easily explained by the results of your blood test.” 

The symptoms tick off in Scully’s mind, everything falling into place, everything making sense. “I’m pregnant, aren’t I?” she says knowingly.

The doctor smiles wider. “Yes, you are. Your blood tests indicated anywhere from five to seven weeks along. We’d like to do some more testing to be sure.”

“Yes, of course,” Scully says. She is twisting the ring again. Mulder had said he wanted to have kids; he’d mentioned it, just once, years ago, but it’s the only time she remembers him saying something like that in all the years she’s known him. Mulder, who is in the waiting room, thinking she has cancer. “I need to, um, I need to go get my partn- I mean, my husband. I need to go tell my husband.” The word is clunky and unfamiliar in her mouth; she rotates the ring again, roughly enough to chafe the skin. 

The doctor nods towards the door, so she gets to her feet and walks down the hall out into the waiting room, stomach building with anticipation. They’ll deal with whatever emotional consequences follow later; they are going to have a baby. She smiles. She shoves the door open, already turning towards the couch she’d left Mulder on. 

He isn’t there. 

She turns, scanning the waiting room for any sign of him; watches the still doors of the restroom for a minute. Nothing. She walks to the glass doors and scans the sidewalk outside. He isn’t there, either.

Fear rises steadily up her throat, but she tamps it back down, walking calmly over to the receptionist’s desk. “Excuse me, did you see where the man sitting over there went?” she asks. “Tall, dark hair?"

The receptionist clears her throat, doesn't look up from her work. “He left.”

Scully bites her lip. Even if Mulder was having a hard time dealing with this - and he undoubtedly was - he wouldn’t just get up and leave. Not before they knew for sure. “He just… stood up and walked out?” Her voice sounds halfway ridiculous to her, shaky and scared. 

The receptionist nods. 

Her completed faith that Mulder wouldn’t just leave her here is scaring her more than anything. Her bag is still on the ground beside the couch; she pulls her cell phone out of it and presses 1 on Speed Dial. Her wild terror is sealed when a responding ring echoes through the waiting room, slightly muffled. His phone is wedged between two couch cushions, and upon looking out the window, the car they’d driven over is missing, and Mulder is gone. 

***

It feels like deja vu, like maybe the only time she can find out she's pregnant  is when Mulder is gone. 

She tries not to worry herself more on the ride home by thinking about the baby, but that doesn’t help much at all. Maybe she’d be happier, more relaxed if she knew where Mulder was, but his absence has cast a dark cloud over this entire thing.  _ It’s not going to be William,  _ she tries to tell herself in the back of the cab. It was the same thing she’d told herself with William, when she couldn’t stop picturing a little girl who looked like her sister and called her Mommy in a fever dream. 

She thumbs tears from the corner of her eyes, and the driver hands her a tissue. She keeps one hand on her abdomen like it is her anchor.

Scully forces herself to take the elevator up to the apartment instead of the stairs, trying to stay calm. She laces her fingers together tightly, but the chill of metal is just a cruel reminder, and she leans solidly against the wall. 

She fumbles with the key for a few solid minutes before actually getting it to turn, shoving the door open and calling, “Mulder?” Silence answers her. There aren’t any lights on in the apartment; the bag from breakfast is exactly on the table where she left it. “Mulder?” she calls again, searching all of the rooms of the apartment. Empty. 

She pulls out her phone and dials the Gunmen’s number, hears the customary “Lone Gunmen” and snaps, “Turn the goddamn tape off, Langly.” 

Something clicks on the other end. “Scully?” Langly asks. “What’s wrong?”

She rubs her temple wearily, eyes closed in composure. “Look, have any of you guys heard from Mulder? Today? Like, in the past hour?”

“I haven’t,” Langly says. “Byers! Frohike!” he shouts away from the speaker. “You guys talked to Mulder today?” His voices come back clearer. “Not today, sorry.”

Scully leans heavily against the counter, nausea building. “He didn’t mention having to do anything today?” she says miserably. 

“No… Scully, what is it?”

“I, um… I had a doctor’s appointment. He disappeared from the waiting room before I could tell him what the doctor said. He left his cell phone behind, and he took his car.” Scully swallows hard, pressing her forehead into the kitchen cabinet. 

“Scully?” Langly says, and he sounds almost as nervous as she feels, now. “Do you think this is related to the chip?”

They’d told the Gunmen about the chips at Mulder’s insistence - he’d wanted to let them study one, had suggested it when he’d wanted to take his chip out and she wouldn’t let him. They’d done some research, but hadn’t been able to find anything - according to the US Government, those chips don’t exist.

“I-I don’t know. I think so. He wouldn’t have stranded me there like that on his own.” Whatever the cause, it is very likely that they have him. Oh, God, they have him. She swallows. “Langly, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I know something, okay?” She hangs up, dropping the phone on the counter with a clatter and making it to the bathroom just in time. 

When she is finished, she slumps back against the bathroom wall, hand against her abdomen. She thinks of the baby and, absurdly, wants to cry. 

Back in the kitchen, she calls both of Mulder’s parents in turn. Her conversation with Teena is increasingly awkward - she doesn’t actually remember who Scully is, and she has to remind her (“Dana Scully? Fox’s… partner? We came up and visited a couple of years ago. Yes, I’m his… girlfriend.” [She doesn’t want to break news of the wedding awkwardly over the phone when it’s Mulder’s place to do that, anyway.]). Bill Mulder, at least, seems to know who she is, but definitely isn’t in a talking mood. After a quick, harried, “No, I haven’t heard from him,” he hangs up the phone, leaving Scully with a sharp dial tone. There’s a good possibility he knows something, so she scribbles it down as a note on the Quantico notepad they make grocery lists on. 

She calls Melissa and her parents, even though it’s unlikely he would’ve told them anything, and Skinner before she gives up. It's time for a different approach, she decides, and the decision sits heavily in the pit of her stomach.

***

 She starts to just go straight to the building, but reconsiders when she thinks of the baby, goes and gets a bullet-proof vest first. This won’t do much to protect them, but it’ll do a little. She fastens it on underneath her shirt and drives calmly to the warehouse-like building where Blevins had met with her the last few times. She takes his car - they'd taken her car in the morning, she'd wanted to drive.

Blevins had given her clearance, before, and she uses that to get in. The inside is cramped and dingy, but looks nothing like a warehouse; there are rows of doors that almost resemble prison halls. The forest surrounds the building on three sides; it’d make a good prison. She’s tempted to shout Mulder’s name, but if she’s wrong and he isn’t here, it’ll give away her hand too soon. She walks through the hallways until she reaches the room where they’d met before and pulls out her gun before entering.

There’s a group of men sitting around a table, but she only recognizes two of them: Blevins and the nameless smoker. She steps forward and presses the muzzle of her gun to the smoker’s head before anyone can say anything. “Where is he?” she snaps. 

Some of the men are staring at her in shock or fear, but most of them have a placid look on their faces. Blevins looks furious. “What the hell are you doing, Agent Scully?” 

The smoker is eerily calm, even with a gun to his head. He’s still smoking, stench of nicotine making Scully’s nose sting. She swallows hard. “Where’s Agent Mulder?” she hisses. “I know about the chips, how they work. And I know you’ve tried to take me and Mulder before. He's gone; you can imagine how I came to this conclusion." 

“Agent Scully, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” one of the men says.

“Oh, bullshit,” she snaps. “You’ve been targeting us for years! You sent me to spy on Mulder, and you abducted us on our first case, and you sent Duane Barry, and you had us arrested. Now you’ve taken Mulder, and I want to know where the hell he is!”

The smoker laughs, a sinister rattling sound. She shoves the gun harder against his skull. 

“The chips are not our technology,” another man says. “We’ve tried to obtain you and Agent Mulder before, but only because we didn’t know you had the chips. You weren’t supposed to have the chips; we didn’t choose you.” 

“And if Agent Mulder is missing, we have nothing to do with it,” Blevins says.

Her head is swimming with confusion and cigarette smoke. “Bullshit,” she says again, dizzily. 

A sharp blaring sounds from somewhere in the building, followed by a pound of feet. The smoker turns to look at her, so that his forehead is underneath her muzzle instead of the back of his head. “That’s the alarm, Miss Scully,” he says seriously. “And security, come to arrest you.”

“You fucking tell me where he is,” she hisses, cocking her gun.

“Not here. That’s all I’ll say.” He’s practically taking delight in this, playing with her mind. 

If he really isn’t here, then she needs to get out. If she’s arrested, she’ll never get out, never find Mulder. And they’ll probably take the baby. She backs slowly to the door, gun still aimed, before turning and shoving out, running down another hallway. She weaves through the labyrinth of locked doors, alarm still echoing in her ear. She passes an open-door lab with people in white coats and something green smeared on their scalpels. One of them opens his mouth to yell; she runs faster. 

Down another hall is an Exit sign, glowing red like hellfire. She sprints towards it, lungs burning, until she hears footsteps headed towards her from another direction. Desperate, she ducks behind a door, closing it and pressing her ear to it. She holds her breath and listens, waiting for the footsteps to fade down the hall.

“What the hell?”

Scully whirls to see a women in a hospital gown in the corner of the tiny room she’s hidden in. The woman is huddled up against the back of her cell, jammed between two walls and the corner of her tiny cot, hazel eyes wide and frightened. They look too familiar to be a coincidence. The hospital bracelet on her wrist reads  _ Mulder. _

“Samantha?” Scully whispers. “Samantha Mulder?”

Samantha nods, skinny wrist almost disappearing in her cloud of wavy hair as she shoves it out of her face. “Who are you?” she snaps irritably, some of the fright easing up. “No one's called me Mulder in twenty years. You're too well dressed to be the nursing staff, so I'm guessing you must be high up on the food chain.” She shrugs, motioning to the ceiling. “But then again, maybe not, if you’re the one they’ve got the alarm blaring for.”

“My name is Dana Scully,” she says, lowering her gun from chest height. She can't believe she found her. Twenty odd years of looking on Mulder's part, and she walks into a prison cell and finds her just like that. “I work for the government. I'm going to get you out of here.”

Samantha laughs bitterly. “The government's all with Them. Or didn't you get the agenda?”

“I didn't, actually,” Scully says. Apparently Samantha has her brother's talent of unwanted snark in a bad situation. “Come with me. You can trust me, I swear.”

Samantha only hesitates a moment, chewing her thumbnail contemplatively, before coming over cautiously to join Scully. “What do I have to lose, at this stage?” she mutters. “It’s been twenty-four goddamn years.”

“Follow me. Stay close,” Scully says, holding her gun up again, at the ready. She shoves the door of the cell open with her foot, and feels Samantha’s hand clench around her sleeve. They move down the hall in a clumsy motion, towards the glowing Exit sign. “Stop!” someone shouts behind them. She’s estimated wrong. A bullet whizzes past them. Scully runs faster, shoving their way out of the emergency exit and ignoring the blare of alarms. 

Outside, the sunshine is blinding compared to the dark of the facility, and Samantha throws an arm up over her eyes. Scully grimaces; she is pale and likely not used to being in the sun. “The car’s right over here,” she says, leading Samantha towards it. “We’re going to get out of here, I promise.”

They get into the car, and Scully speeds out of the parking lot without slowing down. Her heart is still pounding. Samantha braces herself against the seat, pressing an arm against the seat and yanking her seatbelt over herself.

Scully’s brow furrows; it's almost unbelievable. She'd gone to that building so many damn times, before Duane Barry, and she'd never known… “How long were you there?” she asks softly.

Samantha turns to her, eyes still wide and somewhere between frightened and incredulous. “Lady, what the  _ hell  _ is going on?”

Scully bites her lip. Interrogating Samantha is not the best approach. “Maybe we should talk,” she mutters, pulling off the road into a parking lot, gun still across her lap in case they are followed.

“Yeah, good idea,” she snaps, eyes on the gun. “Maybe you could start by telling me who the hell you are, Dana Scully.”

“I’m Mulder’s partner,” she says, because she’s used to it. She realizes just after that maybe she should’ve introduced herself as his wife. Or at least called him Fox. Or something remotely familiar to this girl who hasn't seen her brother since she was eight. 

Samantha’s brow furrows in confusion. “Mulder… you mean Bill Mulder? My father?”

“No,” Scully says, absently twisting her ring. “Fox Mulder. Your brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’d like to apologize for the craziness of this chapter. it’s probably my favorite so far, and i’ve had large chunks of it sitting in my document since december.  
> (i know the cancer scare turned pregnancy thing is a cliche, but i felt like it worked well with the rest of the story.)


	11. Chapter 11

**eleven.**

He drives. Scully sits in the seat beside him, flipping through a book. She is surprisingly placid for the news they've just received. (She's just received. Why did he say “they”?) The flowers he’d bought her sit in the back seat, untouched.

They pass a sign for West Virginia. “Scully, I thought we were going to Pennsylvania,” he says.

“No,” she says. “We’re going to Oregon. I told you that.”

He blinks, confused as to why they didn’t just take a plane. He's more confused that he should be, he thinks. He notices the wedding band on his left hand.

“Scully, you're my wife,” he says.

She looks up at him, all concern. “Mulder, I'm really worried about you,” she says. She holds up her left hand. No ring.

“Where's your ring?” he wants to know. “I-I put it on your hand. We did a bunch of sentimental junk we don't normally do, but I wanted to do it, Scully. For you. I don't want to lose you.” He's babbling, nonsensical, confused, but he needs to know if his memories are real or not. He remembers a courthouse, the ring clunkily sliding over Scully’s tiny knuckle, her mouth hot under his. It can't be fake; it's too vivid.

“I think you should just focus on the road,” Scully says. Her nose is bleeding, and she doesn't seem to notice. “I called you this morning to come to the oncology ward so I could tell you about my cancer. That's what we did this morning.”

“I drove you to the hospital. I waited for you.” Or did he? His mind is a muddled mess of confusion and he has no idea what's right and what's wrong.

The lower half of Scully's face is eerily stained with blood. “Just drive, Mulder,” she says, so fucking softly. “For me. Please.”

***

Samantha blinks at her incredulously. “ _Fox_?”

“Yeah,” Scully says nervously, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I'm sorry if that was confusing… I, uh, I call him Mulder.”

She laughs bitterly, reaching for the car door handle. “This is an interesting new trick, I have to say. What's the catch? How does the experiment end this time?"

“It's not an experiment, it's not a trick,” she says desperately. “I have a picture of him somewhere… please, wait, I can explain.” She pulls out her wallet.

Samantha leans back against the seat, arms crossed over her chest. “You have to be lying,” she says, voice faltering. She sniffles. “My brother is dead. They told me he died the night I was taken.”

“No, no, he's fine,” Scully says quickly, rummaging faster through her wallet in search of a photo. Goddamn, why doesn't she have any pictures of him? How did they get married a few hours ago and she doesn't have a picture of him? “He didn't die that night. He's alive. He's been looking for you.”

Samantha blinks hard, like she might cry. “All this time?” she whispers, like she can't believe it.

Scully looks up from her wallet and nods, trying to smile reassuringly. “All this time.”

Samantha wipes her eyes quickly. “God, I…” She laughs that same bitter laugh again. “He's alive? Really alive?”

Scully gives up on the wallet and checks the glove compartment. His badge lies among the mess of papers that she's told him to organize a million times. Panic tamps up from deep inside her - God, he left his badge and he's gone, he left, and she doesn't know where - and she forces it back down, passes the badge to Samantha.

She studies it for a long minute, turning it over and over in her hands. “He joined the FBI,” she says in quiet surprise, tucking tangled hair behind her ear. “He looks different, but he looks exactly the same. Does that make sense?”

Scully nods.

Samantha passes her back the badge, chewing her lip. “I've only ever thought of him as twelve since I was taken,” she says softly. “I thought of myself as the older sister, because I'd survived, gotten older than him. That's even more ridiculous.”

“It's not,” Scully says softly, because she'd thought of Missy that way at one point or another.

Samantha hunches down in the seat, looking almost childlike in her hospital gown. She wipes her eyes again. “It's Dana, right?”

“Dana works. Or Scully. That's what Mu- Fox calls me.” She's twisting the ring again. This is going to become a damn habit, isn't it. There's no way they can hide the marriage, on public records or in person, because she can't stop touching the damn ring.

“Scully,” Samantha tries. “So. Where's Fox now?”

Scully stares down at the wheel, hands clenching around it. “He's missing,” she says hoarsely.

***

He stops for gas in West Virginia, and Scully steps out to stretch her legs. He comes around the car to meet her, tugging her into his embrace. Her nose is still bleeding, warm liquid soaking into his shirt. “Mulder, it's okay,” she says. “It's okay.”

No, it's not. “I know.” He kisses the top of her head, mumbles, “Do you want anything inside?” into her hair.

She kisses his cheek and asks for a water bottle. He touches her ring finger, just to make sure: no ring.

The gas station attendant doesn't comment on the bloodstains on his shirt. He pilfers around the store, grabbing the peanut M&Ms he knows she secretly loves, a travel package of tissues, and a large water bottle before heading up front to pay. The man barely even looks twice at him.

“My partner had a nosebleed,” he says, because he doesn't want the man to think he's a serial killer or something.

The man blinks slowly at him, confused. “Okay,” he says. “You're buying tissues.” He waves them in the air before scanning them.

“It's just… the bloodstains on my shirt,” Mulder says. “I didn't want you to think…”

The man looks almost concerned now. “There aren't any bloodstains on your shirt,” he says. “You okay, buddy?”

Mulder looks down with a sneaking suspicion that the man is right. He is; there is nothing on his shirt. He swallows roughly and grabs the stuff from the counter. “I'm fine, thank you,” he says before exiting the store quickly, the little bell on the door ominous in its jingling.

Scully is waiting for him outside of the car. “Thank you,” she says softly, reaching for the bag.

He keeps a hold of it. “I know this isn't real, Scully.” Things have been strange since they started, the overwhelming sense that this has all happened before, and he’s sure of it now. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”

“This, this… trip, your sickness, it's all in my head,” he says, waving his hands erratically, bags rustling. “It's a severe flashback, or my head's messed up. But it isn't real.”

Her hand goes to his head, stroking his hair back, checking for head trauma. “I'm worried about you, Mulder,” she whispers. “I think you're in severe denial.”

He cups her face in his hands. “It's not real,” he whispers. “And neither are you.” He leans forward and kisses her forehead tenderly. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But I need to find the real Scully. My wife.”

The not-real Scully sighs wearily, hand traveling down the side of his face. “I worried this would be happen,” she says.

“Wh-what do you mean?” he stammers.

“You're right, Mulder. This isn't real.” She thumbs his cheek in a stroking motion. Her hand smells like copper. “None of this is. This life you've created for yourself, you and me alive, a fresh start, second chance… it's not real.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Mulder says. “I need to find my wife.”

He tries to pull away, but she grips his wrist so he can't - always gentle, never hostile, this is Scully, flashback or not. “You won’t find her,” she says softly. “I'm gone, Mulder. You need to accept that.”

“No.” He pulls away, eyes crashing closed.

They're back in DC, in the copper stained alley, slumped over each other. He's still holding onto her, weakly, their blood smeared along their suits. Scully, he tries to say, but blood fills his mouth. She stares straight ahead, unseeing.

Night falls. He thinks he feels rain, but it’s not raining in DC.

***

“Why are we here?” Samantha demands. “I want to go look for Fox.”

So all the Mulders have this martyrdom about them, this save-the-world syndrome. Scully smiles at this information despite herself. “I want to, too, trust me. But you're probably exhausted. And starving. You need to replenish.”

“I'm fine. It's not been that bad,” she says, following Scully into the building. “I've only been in _there_ for a couple of years. I had other parents, for a while, but… they died.” She blinks hard, pushing her hair back, staring straight ahead determinedly - a coping mechanism she recognizes well. “So things were kind of… normal, for a while. There were tests, but…” She trails off, wrapping her arms around herself. It is February, and she's probably freezing in the hospital gown.

“You're not going to go back there,” Scully says, a bit awkwardly, as they go into the elevator. “It's over now.”

She nods. “I still want to help you find Fox," she says firmly, turning to face Scully.

“You need rest.” Scully had mentioned her doctor credentials in the car, but that hadn't seemed to comfort her.

“I've dealt with this shit since I was eight years old. I'm fine,” Samantha snaps. They step out of the elevator and walk down the hall. “I'll rest after I know Fox is safe.”

Scully resists the urge to say _you are so much like your brother_ as she jams the key in the door. “Okay,” she says quietly. “But we need to get you some food and clothes and maybe a shower first. And I need to get a lead. I have people who can help me find him.”

“A shower would be nice,” Samantha admits. She surveys the apartment as they step inside. “So this is your place?” She steps towards a framed photograph of them together, probably the only one in existence. Mulder had snapped it and surprised her when they'd taken a weekend off at the Outer Banks in 1996 - wind and sea salt in her hair, and her small smile because he'd kissed her right before he'd taken the picture, thrown his arm around her shoulders, holding out the camera at an awkward angle to get both of them in it. She'd teased him mercilessly about framing it, but she's grateful now.

“Yeah,” she says, dropping her keys on the counter. “Well. Mine and Mulder's. Fox’s, I mean.”

Samantha’s mouth quirks in a tiny slip of amusement. “I thought you were partners.”

“Yeah. And we live together.” Scully swallows awkwardly. Damn it, she should've mentioned this earlier.

“You live together? Like roommates?”

Her ring clangs against the tile and reminds her. “We're married," she blurts like a confessional.

When she looks up, Samantha is smirking at her with an eyebrow raised. “You couldn't have mentioned that before the FBI partners thing?”

“I forgot," she tries to explain clumsily. “We, um, it happened today.”

Samantha blinks. “Nice honeymoon you're having.”

“Yes, well…” Scully’s hand clenches around the edge of the counter. “I had a doctor's appointment today. We thought it might be something bad, something… fatal. So he asked me to marry him. We did it today and went right to the appointment. He left from the waiting room.”

Samantha is staring at her. “Are you okay?”

She's tempted to touch her abdomen, but holds off. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

“You're sure Fox left the waiting room? Of his own accord?”

“That's what the staff say.”

“Well, how do you know he's not just… waiting this out somewhere? I don't know how he is now, but he could never handle things like… that very well when we were kids. He'd try to comfort me, but he was horrible at it.” Samantha has an almost wistful look on her face.

“No, he wouldn’t have… wouldn’t have left like that.” She blinks hard, squeezing the granite tighter, knuckles whitening. “He has a… Samantha, do you know about the chips?”

“Fuck,” Samantha says. “Holy _fuck_ , Scully, he has a chip?”

“We both have them,” she says. “We didn’t take them out because we thought they’d make us sick, kill us, if we did.”

“The chips are the worse possible things you could have,” Samantha says viciously.

Scully feels slightly nauseous. “What?”

“The chips are built like a hallucinogen. They're meant to keep abductees calm when they're being called as much as to keep track of them. I’ve had one in since nine." Samantha grimaces. "That was their deal - I kept the chip in, and let them control me when I needed to, and never tried to contact my original parents - which I didn’t really care about, they were neglectful assholes, you’ve probably met them if you married Fox - and I could live a normal life. But the chips...  When they’re not outright making you hallucinate, they'll usually affect your dreams - make them more vivid, life-like. The hallucinations can be abnormal, as well, random, they haven’t perfected the damn technology. And they’re terrible. I flip-flopped between nightmares and hallucinations for years, bad enough that I had panic attacks. I tried to run away from their little 'neighborhoods' after my parents died, wanted to find my mother - birth mother, I mean - and make amends, but they found me and took me to the facility.”

“So they’re… controlling Mulder? Making him hallucinate?”

“The chip has a direct connection to your temporal lobe. It’ll use your memories against you.”

Scully’s head is buzzing. Suddenly, things make sense - their flashbacks, the aggressiveness of them. “What if… what if you were to have a vivid near death experience? With the chips still in, I mean. I think."

Samantha stops in her tracks, staring at her. “What?”

“On our first case together, Mulder and I were in a car crash.” She stops. They have never told anyone about this, what if Samantha doesn’t believe her. _What if this could help you find Mulder?_ She starts again. “Our hearts stopped, and we shared an incredibly vivid… near death experience. An alternate reality of twenty-three years.” She stops to see how Samantha is taking it. She looks awed, but not disbelieving. “It was horrible. After we woke up, we were more than ready to move on with our lives, but then we found the chips.”

“Do you know when you got them?”

“I… I don't know. I don't know when the Syndicate would've gotten to us…”

Samantha is shaking her head. “No, no, the chips aren’t Theirs. They're a product of the aliens.”

“The _aliens_?”

She seems to be considering, bites her lip. “You said you were in a car crash, right? And you had a vivid near death experience?” Scully nods. “What happened leading up to the car accident?”

“I can't tell what's part of the… scenario or not, but I remember a bright light. In the other place, we lost nine minutes.”

“You were abducted,” she says. “By aliens, not Them. And you were returned into a damn moving vehicle, and you probably crashed. And the chips enhanced your NDE, the way they hallucinate dreams.”

Scully touches the back of her neck gingerly. “The… other place,” she says. “It was the chips?”

“Likely the chips’ response to your deaths,” Samantha says, gently.

So it wasn't just a shared near death experience, it was a shared hallucination as well. Like the damn mushroom field. Her head spins.

Samantha lays a hand on Scully's shoulder. “What you were saying before... do you think this… experience connects to the chips in some way?”

“We’ve had flashbacks ever since our return,” Scully says. “They’ve gotten progressively worse over time. We started seeing people… monsters, that we dealt with in the other place, here.  Around this time in the other place… I got a cancer diagnosis from a removed chip. Our flashbacks were bad enough that I was spooked into making an appointment.” She leaves out the nosebleeds, doesn’t want to explain the baby.

“So you were both hallucinating events from this… alternate timeline? Around a tumultuous event in both of your lives?” The words sound ridiculous, but Samantha has a serious look on her face.

“Yes.”

“Scully, how did Fox take your diagnosis in this alternate timeline?”

“Not well,” she says. “He fought hard to save me. The first thing we did was to drive to Pennsylvania to investigate.” It dawns on her suddenly. “Wait, wait, Pennsylvania,” she stammers. “In the… other place, that was somewhere abductees were called to, once. To the Ruskin Dam…”

“You think he’s hallucinating that you have cancer again to force him to drive to Pennsylvania?” Samantha says, panicked.

“It’s definitely a possibility.” She turns away, grabbing her cell phone. “There’s no way we’d make it in time. I’m going to call local PD to check it out.”

***

Samantha emerges out of the bathroom, clad in borrowed clothes. “What did the police in Pennsylvania say?” she asks.

“They're going to check it out, but there's been no reports.” Scully has a cup of coffee, but she hasn't drunk any. She's staring at the lukewarm liquid like she's skilled in the art of divination. (Something Mulder would say.) “Want some coffee?”

“Please.” Scully hands Samantha the Mothman mug. She snorts when she sees it. “Who's idea was that?”

“Mulder's,” Scully supplies.

“I'm not surprised.” She takes a long sip, screwing her eyes shut with pleasure. "He loved ghost stories. He'd tell them to me a lot to piss me off." She smiles.

Scully smiles, too. "He hasn't changed a bit," she tells her. "The unit we head at the FBI is devoted to paranormal cases."

Samantha stares in surprise. "You believe in that stuff? Aliens aside, I mean, obviously."

"Not exactly." Scully bites her lip. "Mulder does. He's passionate about it. But other paranormal cases... mostly a distraction. He's been looking for you all the years. Our positions at the FBI were mostly an advantage."

This may or may not have been the wrong thing to say. Samantha blinks hard, swiping underneath her eyes with the pads of her fingers. "I still can't believe he's not dead," she says softly.

She's spent years comforting Mulder over the same thing. The night he'd disappeared in the woods and reappeared insisting he'd seen Samantha’s ghost, he'd been fine until they got to the hotel. He'd broken down in the shower, curled around her in one of the beds, hugging her tightly to him  and pressing his head into her shoulder, soaking her shirt with the wet weight of his hair and his tears. It had seemed impossible, that the Mulder siblings would ever see each other again. It still almost does. But it's going to happen; she swears it.

She reaches our gingerly and squeezes Samantha’s shoulder. Samantha looks up and smiles smally. "We'll find him," Scully promises. _We have to._

Samantha bites her lip, nods.

Scully changes the subject, awkwardly. “So… before,” she says. “When you said the chips were the… aliens’ technology, and not the Syndicate…”   

“How much do you know?” Samantha asks.

She is blatantly eyeing the refrigerator, so Scully gets out a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. “You could use the protein,” she says. “Not much. I was asked to spy on Mulder in 1993. We found the chips a few months later. We took a case about a year back, with a boy who was repeatedly abducted and returned. Do you want jelly?” Samantha shakes her head. Scully clears her throat, continues uneasily. “A man, um, tried to take me a few years ago. He had the same name and face as a man who did the same thing in the other place and succeeded. But this version of the man was a government employee who worked for the CDC, instead of an alien abductee like in the other place. He asked about Mulder when he made a phone call to his employers, and someone broke into his apartment that night.”

“What happened leading up to your attack?” Samantha asks, accepting the sandwich gratefully.

“Nothing much. I, uh, confronted the Syndicate about the chips a month or so before. I thought they'd done it, and I wanted answers. It was a stupid thing to do.” She gnaws at her thumbnail.

Samantha is already halfway through the sandwich, clearly hungry. She sets it down on the counter, says, “Okay, so I know why you were attacked. They were trying to take you, right? Probably to the labs, like the one I was at. You were an unregistered abductee, and they like abductees. They want to study the chips, want to understand them. They’re especially interested in unregistered abductees because they’re more evidence, in Their minds, that the aliens are trying to destroy us.”

Scully nods.

Samantha chews another bite before continuing. “So here's my understanding, by what the smoking fucker has told me. The aliens have been abducting people for years, right? But in the last one hundred or so, they've had a… deal, if you want to call it that, with the government. They're scared shitless by the aliens, and they want to make sure that we're never invaded. So they pick out people for the aliens to abduct, and the aliens bring them straight to the Syndicate when they're done, with the chips in the abductees so they can be called back if they're ever needed again. The Syndicate keeps most of the low profile ones to study them, but lets the others go so as not to arise suspicion.”

Scully pushes at her thumbnail. “So you were one of the… low profile?”

Samantha laughs bitterly. “No fucking way. I had a family whose father was involved, so I definitely wasn't considered low profile. They kept me _because_ of my father. See, my father didn't want to give up his daughter to the aliens. He tried to make my mother choose, and she wouldn't, so he went with Fox because of his suspicions over Fox's paternity.” She sounds disgusted.

“That was what Mulder remembered in the other place,” Scully says. “He had repressed memories of your father asking your mother to choose, but he wasn't sure if they were accurate after we… came back.”

“They were definitely accurate. Dad had a bias for me. He was an asshole. But I guess he had some shred of humanity, cause the smoker told me he tried to quit. He didn't want Fox to be taken so he tried to pull out, to protect us both. And they took me as leverage so he'd stay in. Kept me for such a long time so he'd keep going. And told me my brother was dead so I'd never try and escape, I guess.”

“They left you with another family?”

“A homeless couple whose baby daughter had died. They gave them a house and assets and me a home as long as we were willing to come at beck and call. So I was Samantha Rutherford for a good long time. Until I came home a couple of years ago to find my parents had been abducted and returned dead.” She leans her forehead into her palms, defeated. “So I ran. I was done. I thought I might find my mom, try to… I dunno, make amends or whatever. But they caught me first.”

Scully nods, chewing her lip. "And you were abducted during your childhood? More than once?"

"Sure. It'd be random, though - sometimes, it would be three times over four months and sometimes it wouldn't happen for years at a time. And there would always be hallucinations accompanying it. They were terrifying."

"I understand," Scully says. She's had them before, after all.

Samantha tips her head to the side like she's concentrating. "I think..." she says slowly. "I think a good place to start would be visiting my mom. There's a good place to start; she might know something about where the chip would send Fox." She gulps. "And, you know. It's been twenty-four years since I've seen her. It's about time."

Scully nods uneasily. "You're right," she says. "I think that's our best opportunity, our best lead. I can keep in touch with my... friends, the hackers, and see if they know anything."

There's the sound of a car, outside, loud enough to hear through the window. Something like excitement bubbles up inside Scully, and she races to look outside. It's not Mulder - it's an unfamiliar car. Three men in suits, with guns, climb out.

Scully turns, fumbling for her gun. "We have to go," she says.

Samantha pauses mid-sip, cup raised to her mouth. "What?"

"They followed us. They're here for us. We have to run."

She drops the porcelain mug onto the counter, something clinking and dark liquid sloshing over the granite tiles. "Let's go," she says, grabbing her shoes in her hands from the corner, not bothering to put them on. Scully scoops her keys up from the counter, clutching her gun in the other hand, and doesn't bother to grab anything else. Samantha rushes barefoot for the door, droplets of water from her hair flying out behind her, and Scully follows closely on her tail, slamming the door behind her but not bothering to lock it. The elevator's light is on. Scully touches Samantha’s arm to motion her towards the stairway. The elevator beeps just as the door slams behind them. They run down four flights of stairs, lungs burning by the time they reach the bottom, ducking into the car. Scully sees the silhouette of a suited man, light burning on the edge of the cigarette, in their window. The X they've kept taped on the window for years now glows.

***

The light blinds him, consumes him.

"Fox!" his sister shouts, and he cannot help her. He is trapped on the floor, hand poised over his father's gun. _Samantha_ , he mouths.

The hill looms over him, Duane Barry's eager shouts, and the light in his eyes. The panic rising in his throat climaxes when he scales the hill and sees Barry alone, without Scully. _Scully is gone_ , he thinks. _No, God, please._

The light is swallowing him whole, tugging him upwards; he can feel it somewhere in his stomach. This is what he'd wanted, secretly, for a long time, to find his sister but. _No, no, I changed my mind, I don't want to leave her._ It's too late, though. He can't move.

The light. It's coming from under his son's doorway; _Will, Will, Will._ He shoves at the door until it opens. "Dad!" William says, eyes begging for help. "No!" he shouts, but William disappears anyway, and this is the only vision that isn't real, didn't happen, but they all didn't happen, or did they. The not-real Scully told him that the real world wasn't real, but if it isn't real, then what is?

They're in the car, in Oregon. Scully says something, but it's too late. The light washes over them. Scully, he tries to say. Scully.

Flashes. They're side by side on metal tables. Scully's unconscious, tangled wet ponytail strewn out across her pale face, wearing the same blue jacket as that night. They're in the car again, and he can't move, can't turn the wheel. The shattering sound of glass.

"Mulder!" Frohike's voice. Someone smacks him a little.

"Oregon," he mumbles. "Have to get to Oregon."

Byers' voice now. "We're just going to give you a sedative, okay? To stave off the effects of the chip."

"Going the wrong way. Have to get to Oregon."

Something punctures his skin. "Just stay calm, okay?" Frohike says. He opens his eyes and sees the bouncing top of the Gunmen’s crappy van.

 _We lost nine minutes!_ he'd shouted to Scully, in the other place. He hadn't known how right he was.

***

They go to Melissa's, parking three blocks away and sneaking down the sidewalks, avoiding streetlights. She looks slightly stunned to see them, two shadowy, drooping figures on the front porch. "Dana, what's going on? Who's your friend?"

"Can we come in?" she asks, partially pushing her way into the house. Melissa moves out of the way, closing the door behind them. Scully turns to face her sister. "Missy, listen, I know it's a lot to ask, but can we stay here tonight and, um, borrow the car tomorrow?"

"Of course, Day, what's... where's Fox?" Her eyes drop to Scully's left hand and widen in disbelief.

"Mulder's missing," Scully says. "And, um, this is Samantha. Mulder's sister."

"Hi," Samantha says uncomfortably, giving a little wave.

Melissa blinks. "I... you're Fox's sister? Oh my... my God, do you need to sit down?"

"I'm okay," Samantha says quickly. "Really."

Melissa drops her hands awkwardly, looking between them. "Dana, what..."

"I can explain, Missy," Scully says quickly."Samantha, do you want to lie down? You must be exhausted."

Samantha looks a little relieved to have an excuse to get out of the room. "Okay, sure."

"I'll, uh, I'll show you to the guest room," Melissa says. She gives Scully a look that says _please explain this when I get out here_. Scully nods in confirmation.

***

Mulder wakes up jostling around underneath a seat belt with a headache and a concentrated stinging in his neck. “He’s awake!” Frohike says triumphantly, from his left side.

From the front passenger seat, Byers passes him a water bottle. “We were worried the sedative would have a bad effect combined with the chip,” he explains.

“We had to tranq you, though,” Langly throws in from the driver’s seat. “You kept trying to get back to the car and mumbling about Oregon. You were completely out of it.”

Mulder gulps gratefully from the bottle; it feels like he hasn’t had water in days. “How’d you guys find me?” he gasps, lowering the half-empty container to his side. “Thanks, by the way.”

“Trackers on your car,” Langly says proudly. “Once we figured out that the chip was involved with your disappearance, we activated the tracker and waited until you were mobilized before following you.”

“You were in a gas station parking lot in Morgantown, West Virginia,” Frohike supplies. “You’re lucky we came when we did; the attendant was close to calling an ambulance, or the police.”

He blinks hard, rubbing his forehead to stave off the ache. “What happened to my car?”

“Attendant had it towed. We thought it’d be better to leave it there, anyway. In case someone was following you,” Byers says.

Mulder clenches his eyes shut, tries to remember the last real thing that happened. Scully was having a nosebleed in a parking lot… no, that wasn’t real, was it? She’d told him that none of it was real, nothing he remembers over the past four years. The alley where they’d died flashes behind his eyelids again, and he shakes his head firmly to clear it. This has to be real, all of it. The last thing he remembers is Scully walking back into the exam room.

“Scully,” he says numbly. “Do you know if she’s okay?”

“We’re… not entirely sure,” Frohike says.

“But we haven’t actually talked to her since she called to tell us you were missing,” Langly adds.

“We tried to call her before we came after you, but she didn’t pick up,” Byers says. “We figured it was for the better, since she had mentioned you two being at the doctor, and we didn’t know if she’d be up for this trip.”

Mulder bites his lip. Suddenly, the only thing in his mind is Scully being under the influence of her chip, like he was. “She wasn’t answering her phone?”

“I’m sure that’s just because she was busy looking for you,” Byers scrambles to say.

“You know how she gets when you’re missing,” Frohike says. “I honestly thought she’d shoot me that one time when you disappeared on the werewolf case.”

“She’s a real tiger when it comes to you,” Langly offers.

It’s meant to ease his worry, but it doesn’t. The panic over Scully being controlled by the chip is replaced with worry over her cancer. God, he’d left her there, alone in that hospital room, possibly sick and upset. He closes his eyes, sagging against the seat. “Thank you. I’m just… worried.”

“We know,” Frohike says reassuringly. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t believe him.

***

“Jesus, Dana,” Melissa says, leaning forward on the couch to give her sister a hug. “You’ve had an awful fucking day.”

Scully hugs her sister gratefully, closing her eyes with the weight of it all. “I… certainly didn’t expect it to go this way,” she says wearily into her shoulder.

Melissa hugs her tighter. “Worst wedding day ever, and I’m including Bill’s wedding day when Mom had a fit over the rain at the reception in that lineup.”

She laughs halfheartedly. “I think that’s an understatement.”

Missy sits back, looking her seriously in the eye. “So you have no idea where Mulder is?”

“No, none. Samantha thinks her mother might know, and I honestly agree. Plus, she’s been away from her family for twenty-four years. She deserves to see them again.” Scully sighs, shoving her hair back and slumping into the couch. “I’m just so tired. And scared.”

Melissa grabs her hand, clutches it tightly. “Let me come with you,” she says.

She’s shaking her head before her sister can finish. “Missy, no.”

“Come on, Day, you need the moral support. And besides, it’s my car you’re borrowing.”

“I can’t,” she says. “It’ll be dangerous. You don’t need to get involved in this.”

“Neither do you, but you’re here, aren’t you?”

“That’s different,” Scully says. “I’m a trained FBI agent. The only reason I’m letting Samantha come is because she’s too involved to step away. And her family is involved, and it’s her brother that’s missing. But I wish she’d stay here and rest.”

Melissa shoots her a disapproving look. “Dana, you’re my baby sister. I can’t let you run off into danger alone. I’m supposed to protect you, remember?”

She shakes her head. “You can’t.”

Melissa shakes her head firmly. She’d walked into the bedroom while Scully was changing, and her eyes had widened at the sight of the bulletproof vest she was unfastening. Her sister is scared shitless by what’s going on, clearly. And if Scully wasn’t just as scared, she’d let her come along.

She sighs, pulling her knees up to her chest like they’re kids again. “Missy…” She stops, hesitant to tell her this. She starts again, uneasily. “Missy, I had a dream that you… died, because of me. You were killed by someone who thought you were me.” Melissa’s eyes widen, and Scully bites down on her lip hard enough to draw blood. “I don’t want to ever risk that happening again,” she says softly.

For whatever reason, Melissa doesn’t comment on the _again_ , and Scully is more than grateful for that. Instead, she says, “I didn’t think you believed in that stuff.”

“I don’t.” She can’t explain the other place to Melissa; it’s too long and unbelievable, and without the added explanation and shaved-down version she was able to give to Samantha, she’s worried she’ll sound crazy. To explain this to Melissa, she’ll have to explain that she has chips in the first place. “It was a very vivid dream,” she says. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“Day,” Missy says soothingly, squeezing her hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Scully smiles, shutting her eyes so Missy won’t see her cry. “You don’t know that.”

“I do,” she says firmly. “I’m going to be around to annoy you for a very long time, little sister. If I can’t protect you from shadowy men with guns who kidnapped your boyfriend - sorry, husband - then I can protect the both of you from Mom and Dad when they find out you eloped.”

Scully laughs. “That’s about the least of my worries right now,” she says, letting go of Melissa’s hand. “But thanks.”

“Believe me, you’ll appreciate it eventually. Mom’s had a wedding venue picked out since Thanksgiving.” Melissa jabs a finger towards the open door of her bedroom. “You take the other bed, okay? You’ve had a terrible day, and tomorrow will probably be longer.”

If she were any less tired, she might argue, but she’s so weary that her bones are almost aching. “Okay.”

She’s halfway to the bedroom before she remembers. She wanted to tell Mulder first, but she has to tell someone, and she hadn’t had a chance to call her sister first last time, after she’d found out Mulder was abducted. (She’d missed her desperately in that moment; had known she wouldn’t interrogate her, or tease her, or been generally awkward about it, would just comfort her.) She turns. “Missy, I’m pregnant,” she says softly. “I found out today.”

Melissa looks shocked, climbs off of the couch and pulls Scully into her embrace, where Scully finally lets herself cry.

***

The Gunmen drop Mulder off at their apartment around 10. He’d wanted to call Scully and check on her, but the Gunmen don’t have cell phones (“You know there’s a good chance that They track you through that, Mulder.”) and he’d left his at the doctor’s office. “Call us and let us know what happens,” Frohike says before he climbs out of the van.

“We’ll help, with whatever it is,” Byers says.

“I’m trying to hack the government frame and get some info on your chips,” Langly says.

Mulder thanks them gratefully before going into the building. He counts the floors, anxiously, as he rides the elevator up, and tries not to sprint down the hallway. He starts to unlock the door, but it gives way without having to turn the key. Pushing paranoia down, he enters the apartment. “Scully?”

The first thing he notices is the mess. Not a complete trashing of the apartment, like when Scully was in the coma in the other place, but a general rummaging through, it seems. The closet is open, their coats and boxes of Scully’s extra stuff strewn over the floor. The fridge hangs open, some food across the kitchen floor. Their bedroom door hangs open. The crusts of a sandwich and a mug in the middle of a puddle of coffee sits on the counter; something that definitely hadn’t been there when they left this morning. That stupid picture he’d taken of them at the beach last year is on the ground, crack running through the glass.

“Scully?” Mulder calls again, slightly more panicked this time. The bedroom and bathroom are empty. There’s no blood, no gunpowder, no visible signs of a struggle; it’s more like someone was searching, here, looking for someone or something. There’s a small pile of ash on the table beneath the window.

His phone lies dormant on the table; he grabs it and presses 1. He listens to it ring for a few seconds before his stomach flips at the sound of another cell phone ringing from her bag, still on the counter.

“Shit,” he hisses, hanging up and dropping the phone on the counter. He checks the bedside table where they’d left their guns this morning ( _It’s not like we’ll need them today, Scully_ , he’d said, what the hell was he thinking). His is right where he left it; hers is gone. _At least wherever she is, she has her gun,_ he thinks. Or whoever took her has it.

A sharp knock on the door interrupts him. He is briefly excited - _maybe it’s Scully, and she just doesn’t have her keys_ \- but is immediately disappointed when he sees who it is: an unfamiliar man. Banking on the hope that he’s unarmed or uninvolved with the Syndicate at all, Mulder wrenches the door open. “Can I help you?” he snaps.

“I’m looking for Dana Scully,” the man says. He’s short, dark haired, with eerily familiar blue eyes. “I went to her listed address, but the apartment was empty, and once I told the neighbors who I was, they redirected me here.”

Mulder raises his hand to rest against the door frame, hall light glinting off of his wedding band. The man raises an eyebrow at that. “And who are you?”

“I’m her brother,” he says. “Charles - well, Charlie.”


	12. Chapter 12

**twelve.**

"So I guess Dana hasn't told you a lot about me, huh," Charlie says, sitting on the couch.

Fighting back nerves, Mulder rattles around the kitchen, throwing away the sandwich crusts and setting the mug in the sink. It's the only thing keeping him remotely calm. "No, she has," he says, picking at a spot of peeling paint. "She just... said you hadn’t seen each other since she left for college. And she tried calling but could never get in touch with you."

"Yeah." Charlie sighs, scratching the back of his neck. "It had nothing to do with Dana, I just had to... things were complicated."

"I can understand that," Mulder says, chewing his lip. The mug clanks against the walls of the sink.

"Yeah, I, um, think you probably can," Charlie replies, kind of nervously. "I've heard about what you're involved in." Off Mulder's surprised look, he adds, "I got in contact with Melissa a few months back. She mentioned your department, what you and Dana do. Something about your sister. And aliens.”

"Yeah, she was, uh, she was abducted when I was twelve. By aliens." Mulder doesn't bother trying to sugarcoat it; Charlie must think the idea has some substance if he's asking, and besides, this is not the time for sugarcoating. He slumps against the counter, twisting his ring. He still hasn't mentioned that Scully is missing. He doesn't know how to bring it up: _hey, estranged brother-in-law (as of this morning), your sister is missing, and I don't know if she's been abducted or is on the run or what the hell is going on because I was missing as of a few hours ago._

"Right." Charlie gulps. "So you should probably know that I'm an abductee, too.”

Mulder gapes a little, his mouth hanging open. "How..." he starts, a sentence he doesn't know how to finish. _How does this relate to Scully's abduction?_ _How could Scully never tell me?_

"Dana never knew," Charlie says quickly. "It happened after she left for college, when I was about seventeen. I left pretty soon after. I had enough credits to graduate early, so I fucking ran.There was no reason to stay."

Mulder swallows roughly. "Was it... did it have anything to do with..."

"My dad?" Charlie supplies. "Yeah. I mean, that was what I got from the whole ordeal after I was returned. Dad hauled off and hit the guy who brought me home, and he and Mom yelled for a few hours while I was supposed to be sleeping in the other room. I asked Dad about it the next day, and he refused to say anything and went out to sea for a while. And Mom got upset every time I brought it up. It happened a couple more times, and I finally got sick of it. So I left. And, you know, eventually I figured out that the chip was fucking everything up, so I cut it out and moved on with my life. The abductions stopped. It was over, I thought."

"W-wait, you took the chip out?" Mulder stammers, pressing sweaty palms against the tile. The chip is almost buzzing in his neck, like it’s going to snatch him away again. "You didn't get sick or anything?"

Charlie looks stunned. "No," he says. "Do you know someone that _has_?"

"No, um, Scully, uh, Dana... Dana and I, we were abducted. And we haven't taken the chips out because we thought the results would be fatal."

Charlie startles a little, looking concerned. "Dana was abducted?"

"Um, yeah, we were. On the first case after she was assigned to work with me." Mulder twists his ring. He has too much to apologize for.

Charlie's eyes are wide and worried. "Is she okay?"

 _I don't know._ "She has been, yeah, we just, um, we didn't take the chips out because we thought it would kill us."

Charlie licks his lips contemplatively; nods, solemnly. "The chips aren't fatal, Mr. Mulder," he says. "They'll threaten you to keep them in, but if you take them out, nothing happens to you physically."

Mulder swallows painfully, turns the ring around and around. So they've kept it in all this time for nothing. He wishes he'd cut it out the night they'd found it. Or let Scully cut it out. Then she'd be safe, at least. "Okay," he says. "Okay, then, there's something you should know. Scully's missing. Dana, I mean. Dana’s missing."  
***

Melissa doesn't come with them. Scully hugs her tightly, shakes her head silently. Missy rolls her eyes and tousles her hair, tells her to be careful.

"Your sister's nice," Samantha says in the car. Scully notices Mulder's FBI badge open on her lap.

"She is," she says quietly, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat.

 _It feels wrong, almost, doing this_ , she thinks when they're standing on Teena Mulder's doorstep. It should be Mulder bringing his sister home. Intellectually, Scully knows that Samantha has chosen to come here and it shouldn't have anything to do with Mulder. But she still feels bad, like she is stealing something from Mulder. A moment that should be his.

Samantha raises her fist, lowers it. "Will you knock?" she says softly to Scully, scrambling back from the door. "You've talked to Mom before, right? I mean, you married my brother."

The married thing is still startling; they'll have to work on that. ”I've talked to her a lot less than you might think," Scully says, but she knocks on the door anyway.

Teena opens it after about a minute of waiting. (Samantha bounces on her heels the entire time, little-kid nervous.) "Dana?" she asks, opening the door a little wider. "I told you I don't know where Fox is." Her eyes move to Samantha with confusion. "Who's your friend?"

Samantha swallows uneasily. "Mom," she says.

Teena blinks rapidly, eyes filling with tears. "Samantha?"

"It's me," she says, smiling sheepishly.

"Oh, my god." Teena reaches out and draws Samantha closer.

(There's a picture in one of the boxes Mulder stashed in the closet, of the Mulders on vacation at the beach. It's a snapshot of Teena holding a seven-year-old Samantha on her lap, gangly legs too long for her lap, but both of them smiling toothily into the camera. Teena only ever smiles in pictures when her children are young, Scully has noted - there's less pictures of Mulder as a child, but there's some where she looks that happy.)

(Samantha is too tall to be held by her mother, but their embrace on the front porch makes Scully think of that picture.)

"My baby..." Teena says, choked, into Samantha’s shoulder. "Bill said you couldn't come back."

"I broke the rules," Samantha mumbles, almost crying. "You know I'm good at that.”

Scully looks away politely, eyes sweeping out over the front lawn. Behind her, Teena and Samantha murmur to each other. She tries not to think about the baby.

"Come in, sweetheart," Teena says, tugging Samantha inside. "You, too, Dana," she adds as an afterthought.

Samantha stiffens a little inside the house - inside the living room where she was abducted, Scully realizes. "They told me Fox was dead," she whispers, haunted, staring at a spot on the carpet near the TV.

"What? Oh, no, honey, Fox is fine."

 _He might not be, really_ , Scully thinks bitterly, tugging at the sleeves of her coat. _But you wouldn't know, because you couldn't talk to me on the phone for five damn minutes._

"I know," Samantha says. "Scully told me."

Teena looks over at her for the first time since they arrived, eyes narrowing in confusion. "How did you get home?" she asks cautiously. "Where's Fox? Did he find you?"

Scully bites down on her lip so hard it bleeds.

"We don't know where he is," Samantha says, and her voice trembles. "That's why we're here, Mom. We need to know what you know about the abductions."

Teena's jaw clenches. "Nothing," she says shortly. "I only know what your father told me, and he said that they wouldn't bring you back."

"Mom, I know Dad made you choose between me and Fox," Samantha says, an edge almost entering her voice.

She blinks rapidly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Scully swallows painfully. She's had complicated feelings for Teena in both realities; she knows that most of what happened in the other place wasn't real, but the resent still lies under her skin, cold and sharp. And Mulder’s referenced the cold remainder of his childhood after Samantha was abducted. "Your son is missing," she says sharply. "We want to find him, and we'd appreciate your help."

"What happened to him?" Teena asks, voice faltering. She'd drawn backwards when she'd heard the bite in Scully's voice, like she'd been slapped.

"We don't know," Scully says. "We think it has something to do with the chips."

"Mom, please," Samantha says, laying a hand on her shoulder tentatively.

Teena swallows, sitting on the loveseat. "I don't know anything about the chips," she says. "I don't know anything, really... just that Bill was involved in a project and he had to give up one of you kids. And that they took you when he tried to back out." Samantha sits beside her mother uncertainly, and she reaches up to smooth a long strand of hair back. "He didn't tell me anything else."

"What about Mulder?" Scully asks. "Do you know anything about his abduction?"

Teena looks rattled, smoothing her nightgown. "Fox was abducted?" she says faintly.

"About four years ago. We were abducted together."

"Bill swore it wouldn't happen to both of you," she says, her voice thick with anger. "He _swore_."

Samantha chews a thumbnail, looks down at the floor darkly. Scully can't imagine how she must be feeling. "The men... they said they didn't choose us," she says. "They said we were random."

Teena looks uncertain. "I don't know anything," she says finally, to Samantha. "You'll have to ask your father if you have any other questions."

Samantha stands abruptly. "I do."

"Wait." Teena's fingers catch her daughter's hand gently. "Can't you wait a little while? I haven't seen you in so long, sweetheart." Her voice is pleading, cracking. (Scully wonders if she would've been that way if she'd ever had a chance to see William again, in the other place; no, she decides, she'd have no right to be that needy. She'd given him up. But then, didn't Teena and Bill give Samantha up? Not willingly, apparently. And she'd given up William to prevent him from ever having that fate.)

Samantha turns, uncertainly, hands clenching by her side. "Mom, did you look for me after they took me?"

She blinks. "I... no, your father said it was useless..."

"Did Fox look?" Her tone is wounded, sharpened like a knife.

Teena swallows. "Yes."

Samantha twists the hem of her shirt in her hands. "Well, then, I'm going to look for him. It's important, Mom. I owe him."

Teena blinks, nods uncertainly. "I know," she says quietly. "He's my son, you know. I do care."

Samantha thumbs the corner of her eye, wiping away a tear. "I'll come back, okay?" she says thickly. "After we find him. We can catch up, Mom."

Teena stands and embraces her. Samantha hugs her back for a minute before stepping back. "We've gotta go." She leans down and kisses her cheek before crossing the room to stand beside Scully.

Teena watches them, meeting Scully’s eyes for the first time in minutes. "Take care of them," she says shortly. Scully nods, unable to say anything remotely civil, before Samantha motions her out of the room.

"Are you okay?" she asks Samantha outside, laying her hand gently on her shoulder.

Samantha jerks a little at the sudden contact, and Scully immediately withdraws it. She stares at the ground, long hair hiding her face. "I'm fine," she says. "Let's go talk to my father so we can find my brother."

***

Collectively, Mulder and Charlie agreed to go and talk to Captain Scully the next day. "Dad might know what's going on," Charlie had said. "I don't know if he's involved with Dana’s abduction, or Dana missing this time, but I think he'll know something." Charlie had slept on the couch, and Mulder had slept alone in the bedroom. (Slept was an inaccurate word, actually; he'd spent most of the night tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, jumping at every little sound like it was Scully come home. He'd fallen asleep and woken up with Scully's cell phone digging in under his chin. It hadn't rang all night.)

It's almost twelve when he finally gets up - he's almost ashamed of the fact that he slept so late, but the day before was exhausting. He offers Charlie some coffee.

"Sure," Charlie says. He leans against the counter, meeting Mulder's eyes. "You and Dana are married, aren't you?"

Mulder laughs, mirthless, punches a button on the coffee maker (a relic from Scully’s apartment). "Is it the ring?"

"I did notice that."

"It was an impulse thing. We didn’t plan for it. No one else knows about it," he says, sheepishly. Bill would've punched him in the face right about now, but Charlie doesn't seem like the type to do that. He even seems like he almost might like Mulder, despite the fact that he has no idea where his sister is. Charlie seems to understand what Mulder's been going through, at least. That's something.

Charlie nods. "I've missed her all these years," he says. "I didn't blame her. Or... Missy or Bill. But resentment runs deep, you know."

Mulder nods; he does know.

"I have a three year old son," Charlie says, finally. "Another one on the way. I want them to know their aunts and uncle."

Mulder nods. He can't help but remember the only version of Charlie he's ever known before this, the one who called over his mother's death bed, who Scully hadn't wanted to talk to after, hanging up the phone and hurling it into a corner of the room. Who hadn't attended his mother's funeral. He wonders if things were the same in the other place, if Charlie was estranged because he was an abductee and Captain Scully was the reason. But then again, chips don't work the same way there that they do here. Did Charlie know about his sister's work in the other place? He must've known a little, Melissa died from it, two of Scully's children were gone forever because of it. Why had he never reached out there?

He'd left voicemails after Maggie’s death that Scully had refused to listen to. Mulder had accidentally listened to one when Scully was in the shower one night. There was a series of crackling sounds before Charlie's voice had come through: "Dana, it's Charlie." He'd paused before saying, "Listen, I know we haven't talked in a long time, and I know you've been through... a lot." His voice cracked. "But you shouldn't... you shouldn’t have to go through Mom's death by yourself. Call me, okay? I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry... for everything."

(Mulder had tried to convince Scully to listen to them; he couldn't stand the idea of one of them losing anyone else. He'd give anything to talk to his father again, even with the rifts between them. But Scully had studiously refused, firm in her grief, had squared her shoulders and buried her nose in a file. I need to work, she kept saying, and she had. She has barely mentioned Charlie since they got back.)

The two of them don't have much to say to each other; they've never actually met, and Charlie seems like a quiet person by habit. They drive over to Baltimore separately, and Mulder resents the quiet; all it does is leave more room for worrying about Scully.

Charlie gets there before him, somehow; the red rental car he’d driven away from the apartment is waiting in Maggie’s driveway when Mulder pulls in. Feeling absurd being here without Scully - he’s come alone before, but always in the other place, and always after Captain Scully had passed - he creeps up the driveway, uncertainly.

Maggie’s the one who answers the door. “Fox,” she says, nervously, eyes darting over her shoulder. He’d expected her to ask about Scully, but he’s revising his theory to say that maybe Scully is here (this is almost how she answered the door when Scully’s brain had been a muddled mess that thought he was trying to kill her), when Maggie says, “Your father’s here,” in a rush.

Mulder’s brain doesn’t catch up with her words. “My… what?” he repeats, dumbfounded. _What the hell is going on here?_

“Bill Mulder? He’s in the living room.” Maggie’s practically babbling. She laughs skittishly. “Isn’t it funny that your father is named Bill, too? I think he knew my Bill from back in the day."

“Really?” Mulder says absently, entering the house. He can't believe no one ever figured it out; or maybe it was purposeful, like everything is. His eyes shift towards the living room. He’s mostly been in this house for holidays in this universe, so it feels strange without a few extra assorted Scullys shifting through the halls. He steps into the living room; one year/twenty three years ago, Scully had pointed a gun at him here and accused him of betraying her. He’s sure there will be plenty of other betrayal accusations here before the day is up.

His dad is, in fact, sitting on the couch opposite Scully’s father in the chair and Charlie standing awkwardly in between them. The two older men both stand up when they see him answer the room; his dad says, “Fox.”

If it were any other situation, he’d probably act civil to put on a good act for Scully’s father, but Scully’s life could be on the line and he has no idea what’s going on, so it hardly seems like the time for civility. “What the hell are you doing here, Dad?” he snaps.

His father looks outraged that he’s talked to him like this; Scully’s father supplies, uneasily (more uneasily than he’s ever seen him look): “We met a few times years ago… we had no idea that our children were… seeing each other, and we wanted to catch up.”

“Oh, cut the bullshit, Dad.” This outburst from Charlie, crossing his arms over his chest. “We all know that there’s two things you both have in common: you’re employees of the US Government, and you’re both parents to two abductees.”

Scully’s father looks stricken. “Two?” Mulder’s father repeats. They both turn to look at Mulder.

This was not how Mulder planned on telling them - if ever - but he nods his confirmation. “Two,” he says.

"Dana?" Scully’s father asks gravely, and Mulder has no choice but to bod in confirmation.

“Quit it with the high-and-mighty, Dad," Charlie spits. "You know the only reason we're involved in this in the first place is because of you."

"Charlie..." Maggie stands in the doorway, whitefaced.

"Charles, I had no choice." Captain Scully’s voice is tight, weary. He's slumping, looking smaller than Mulder's ever seen him. "They threatened this family... we never would've had a future if I hadn't done what I did."

Maggie turns and leaves the room. Charlie's face is almost red, slumping hard against the bricks.

"There's always a choice," Mulder's father says. Mulder wants to laugh: _that's rich, coming from you._ He turns to face Scully’s father. "Bill, I need to know what choice you'll make. This will all come to an end soon. Who's side will you be on?"

"What the hell does that mean?" Mulder snaps. This comes down to more than him and Scully; Samantha, the Gunmen, the other abductees.

The two older men ignore him. "I'm on the side of my family," Scully’s father says.

Charlie laughs bitterly and mutters something about how that would've been nice all those years ago. They ignore him, too.

"This is more complicated than you could imagine," Mulder's father says. "There's a bigger picture here."

"One that I'm not a part of," Scully's father replies firmly. "I think we both have plenty of regrets between the two of us; I'd like to pay for mine."

Bill Mulder nods, stands and walks out of the room, brushing past Mulder without addressing him. Mulder's stomach clenches, and he follows his father out without another word to any of the Scullys.

"Dad!" he shouts as soon as the front door is closed behind him. Inside, there's rumbling sounds of arguing voices.

His father turns around at the end of the driveway to look at him. "What is it, Fox?" he says in the well-remembered _don't-bother-me_ tone from Mulder's childhood.

Mulder jogs down the driveway to reach him. "I need to know what you know about the abductions," he says. "About the chips."

Bill sighs. "I was unaware you were abducted; I never would've allowed it."

"This isn't about me, it's about my partner." Mulder blinks hard, tries not to grimace as a headache descends like a tidal wave. "She's missing, and I think the chips are responsible. I need to know where they'd take her," he continues, clenching his jaw as he tries to ignore the pain.

Bill nods, contemplatively. "The chips take you back to the site of your abduction," he says. "That's all I can tell you." He turns to walk away again.

Mulder's brow furrows. This makes sense with every abduction case they've had so far, including his own chip experience, but as usual, there's one outlier. "Wait," he says, rubbing his temple - the pounding is insistent. "What about Samantha? If she was abducted and she had a chip, wouldn't she have returned to our living room eventually?"

His father stops, not looking back at him, but his muscles tense under his coat.

"Dad," Mulder says. "Is... is Samantha dead?"

His father's shoulders slump. "I don't know," he says, still not looking back.

Mulder's vision grows spotty; a familiar image flashes behind his eyelids, the DC alley that he only sees in his dreams. The familiar sky above them. He can almost feel Scully's weight in his arms.  
***

Samantha’s quiet on the drive to her father's, which is almost a relief; Scully's not in an overly talkative mood herself. Samantha doesn't say anything until the car stops. "This is all so... bizarre," she says, staring at her hands in her lap. "Exhausting. I mean, why the fuck couldn't I have had a normal life?"

Scully laughs a little. "I've asked myself that a few times, believe me."

Samantha shrugs. "What did you say your job was again? Investigating paranormal cases? That's about as far from normal as you can get." She smirks, a little, at Scully from the passenger seat.

Scully snorts. "That is true." She turns off the car, tucking her keys in her pocket. "Are you ready?" she asks softly. She's never actually met Bill Mulder, but she's heard enough stories to imagine that this reunion will be more awkward than the one with Teena.

Samantha nods and opens the car door. "Maybe... you should wait here," she says. "I mean, no offense, Scully, but last time was pretty awkward."

She's almost relieved. "Okay."

Samantha nods, looking just as relieved. "I'll find out what we need to know, okay?" she says. "I promise." She stands and shuts the door behind her.

Scully leans back into the seat, trying to relax (she is tenser than she's been in weeks) while Samantha knocks on the door.

The sound of a gunshot.

Scully fumbles for the door handle, stumbling out of the car and shouting, "Samantha!" She turns, eyes wide and frantic. Another one fires off, hitting the wall of the house, and she dives for the bushes beside the porch.

Scully goes down in a crouch behind the car. Several more gunshots explode behind her, echoing in her head. Scully claps her hands over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut. The sound is gone, but her head is still ringing. She opens her eyes to look for Samantha, opens her mouth to shout her name; it's dark all around. She tries to stand up, but she can't move. She blinks a few times to clear her head, but when she stops, she's not in the parking lot anymore. She's in a field, shivering, and Mulder's sprawled out at her feet. His cheek is scarred the way it was before, and she reaches out to touch it.

"No," she says, voice faltering. "This _isn't real._ Mulder's okay."

 _You don't know_ , something says inside her head.

Stars all around. She shuts her eyes again, in protest, swallowing back her nausea. Familiar lights dance behind her eyes. Mulder's sprawled out on a metal table beside her, soaked with rainwater, wearing the jacket he was wearing the night they died. This isn't real, she tries to scream but her voice doesn't work.

It smells like blood and Mulder is holding her and the sky is shifting, turning darker above their heads. She thinks she feels rain, but it's not raining in DC. Mulder, she tries to say. Blood fills her mouth. His knuckle brushes her cheek. Mulder. Lights flash off the walls of the alley, something like sirens.

***

He reaches for her hand as they're moved into the ambulance, even though the effort is futile and his hand just slips off the edge of the gurney, bloody fingers pointed at the ground. Scully.


	13. Chapter 13

**thirteen.**

She dreams she's in Mulder’s apartment and they're young again and her hair is long, longer than it ever was in the 90's. There's cardboard boxes labeled in her neat, looping cursive, and he collapses on the couch next to her and puts his feet up on one. _Can I ask you something?_ he says, tapping her hip gently. He's staring at his shoes instead of her.

_Sure_ , she says. The fact that he won't meet her eyes is a little worrying. She sits beside him on the couch, Mulder's old leather couch she hasn't seen in years, she thinks. _What's up?_

He chews his lower lip. _Were you, um. Ever going to move back? In the other place, I mean._ He scuffs his shoe along the edge of the box.

_Oh, Mulder_ , she says, wanting to kiss him. She touches his shoulder. _I was, yes. I just... wanted to work up to it. I felt like we had issues to work out, and I wanted to take small steps. But yes, I was going to move back in, eventually. I loved you._

He smiles, still not looking at her. _You loved me?_

_Loved you. Love you._ She grins, too, laying her head on his shoulder. _I never stopped loving you. Not then. Not since 1993._

  1. _Oh, really,_ he says, smug and teasing.



_Hmm_ , she says, pretending to consider. _Maybe a little longer. 1997, at least._

***

She wakes up to a loud beeping - heart monitor. She shuffles through her mind for the last thing she remembers and lands on something - _shot, I was shot. Mulder was shot..._

A nurse is hunched over her bed. She blinks muzzily. "Mulder?" she asks, voice gravelly.

The nurse looks at her questioningly.

"Is she awake?" says someone from the doorway - Skinner. He steps in the room, offering her an awkward smile. "You've been out for a couple days now," he says, voice trembling with relief. "But the doctor says you'll make a full recovery." Of course Skinner would know, he’s the only logical choice to call; her mother is dead, Bill's too far away to be her emergency contact, and Mulder... Mulder's...

"Sir," she says, wincing at the stabs of pain in her torso. "Is Mulder..."

"He's fine," Skinner says quickly. "The bullet missed his spine. He pulled through surgery."

She closes her eyes in relief. "Who found us?"

"A pedestrian heard the first gunshot and caught 911, ran off when he heard the second one. The suspect's in custody." Skinner clears his throat. "Mulder wouldn't let go of you when they were trying to put you in the ambulance. You two are the luckiest pair I've ever seen."

Scully smiles. Her throat is dry and she wants to sleep. "That's true, sir," she says softly, closing her eyes. "That's true.”

***

It's a few more days before she sees Mulder again. The nurses bring him over to her room in a wheelchair, and his entire face lights up when he sees her. "Scully," he whispers, reaching for her hand, and she takes it, squeezing his fingers gratefully.

"I'm so sorry, Mulder," she breathes, because he never would've been shot because of her. He pulls her hand to his mouth and kisses her knuckles, rolling closer. She presses her face into his hair. "I'm so sorry," she says again. He kisses her neck gently. _How long has it been since we've done this?_ she thinks, and then remembers Oregon, a few nights after her mother's death in her new apartment. "How are you healing?" she asks, brushing her fingers through his hair.

"I'm fine, Doc," he murmurs. "I'm just glad you're okay."

She remembers after the gunshot: Mulder's white face hovering over her, pulling her up into her lap and cradling her close, his hand pressing against her chest, cupping her cheek. How scared he'd sounded, like a little kid. The same fear that had coursed through her when he'd slumped over. "I'm glad you're okay," she says, kissing his forehead.

***

She dreams she's driving. Hours and hours going west. It's just silent, the thump of the wheels rhythmic in her ears. Her fingers are clenched tightly around the wheel.

Sometimes William is there. He's a variety of shifting ages - a baby in a car seat, a elementary-aged kid, a teenager slumped in the passenger seat. _Where are we going?_ he asks at one point.

_Oregon_ , Scully says.

_Oregon?_

_Yes_ , she says. _It's where your father and I fell in love._   
***

Mulder comes home with her, both of them on strict instruction to rest. Scully offers to take the couch. "We could hurt each other if we're in bed together," she says sensibly, because she is always sensible.

"I don't want to leave you," he says softly, because he is always sentimental and clingy and she loves him for it. She agrees, can't help it. They sleep on separate corners of the bed in an attempt not to jostle each other, but Mulder grasps for her hand in the center of the mattress every night and she always takes it gratefully.

She almost wishes she'd asked him to take them home - their bed is comfortable, worn in the way that's familiar and perfect. But there's still something in her mind largely holding her back. They haven't talked about _them_ yet, and they need to. But something feels almost different from before. Like there's been a perceivable shift in their repertoire. It feels like something is missing, though she knows there isn't. She wonders if Mulder feels it.

The days melt into each other. Scully almost calls her mother one day before she remembers, curled into the corner of her couch with the phone clutched uselessly in her hand. Mulder sits beside her, shoulder aligned with her pulled-up knees, and rubs the left one comfortingly with his thumb. “You okay, Scully?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” she says. “I just… forgot.” She clasps her mom’s quarter between her fingers.

He rests his cheek on her knee. “You have some missed calls from Bill,” he notes, eyes flicking over her phone screen. “And an unknown number - Charlie again?”

She hums absently in response, turning the phone over and over in her hand.

"You're not going to call them back?" he asks.

"I had to bury my mother on my own," she says sharply. "I don't have anything to say to them."

He doesn't reply, runs his fingers along her calf. "Scully?" he asks, finally. "This is going to sound crazy, but... was Charlie ever abducted?"

She's stunned, and maybe a little irritated at him for asking. "No," she says sharply. "Why would you ask that?"

Mulder lifts his head from her knee. He looks confused, and a little hurt. "I don't know," he says.

***

He dreams a lot about his son. That they're driving somewhere and he wants to drive. _You can't,_ he tells him, and William grumbles in the traditional teenager fashion, but Mulder doesn't give in because he really does have to drive; it's important.

The next night, William is seven and they've just watched _2001: A Space Odyssey_ for the first time, and he's peppering Mulder with questions excitedly, leaning up between the seats. His heart is swelling with paternal pride when Will says it, Scully's blue eyes staring at him very seriously: _Dad, did you lose me?_

Yes, he thinks, and winces. _No, buddy, of course not,_ he says.

William nods sadly. _You did. Now we have to find each other again._

(Mulder's not at all surprised to find he's crying when he wakes up.)

***

He never wants to leave her, can't put into words what it was like to hold her while the life drained out of her, up close and ugly. But something keeps niggling at the back of his mind: this isn't home. This strange apartment, with none of the things that had been theirs. (She'd taken barely anything when she'd moved out, either out of pity or because she wanted no part of their life together.) It's unfamiliar, a reminder of the fact that Scully wouldn't come home with him, before. Between Oregon and her mother passing. (He hasn't had the heart to ask since.)

He curls around her one night, pulling the blankets tighter around them, and she mumbles his name and curls a hand into his t-shirt. He kisses her hair. "I'm thinking about going home," he says (although he didn't know he was going to say that).

She freezes in his embrace for a split second; nods into his neck. "Just, you know, it's been a while and I'm running out of clothes," he adds clumsily, brushing hair from her face. _Look at me_ , he thinks. _Say you'll come with me._

(Somewhere in his conscious, he knows it's wrong to hang this over her head this way. He should just ask. This is the fucked up shit that ended their relationship in the first place.)

"Okay," she whispers. She doesn't offer to come back and he doesn't ask.

He packs a bag the next morning, and she makes him promise to call her at the first sign of trouble. He kisses her at the door and she doesn't let go of him until he pulls away. It feels like ripping a Band-Aid off: sharp, sudden pain. Except this time it doesn't go away after a second.

The true cosmic joke is that being at their house doesn't feel anymore like home then Scully's apartment. Like something has changed. (Or she is his home.)

***

He dreams of some life he and Scully never lived, with her bed in his apartment and her coffee maker is on his counters. (She falls asleep twisted in sheets and surrounded by discarded papers, glasses twisted on her face, and he takes them off her face and puts them on the bedside table, kisses her cheekbone as he crawls in beside her. They're still on the X-Files, which is probably the strangest thing; some kind of wish fulfillment universe, he thinks.)

He wakes up almost sad, goes outside and drinks coffee on the porch alone. It's cold. He calls her. "It's me," he says when she answers.

"Hey," she says. She sounds like she's smiling, voice warming. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm doing okay,” he says, smiling too. He can’t help it. “How about you?"

"Doing well, all things considered," Scully says. "I've... missed you." She says it awkwardly, because almost all of Scully's confessions are awkward, rushed like she didn't mean to say them, embarrassed.

Mulder rubs his thumb over his ring finger without knowing why. The guilt over leaving her alone is overwhelming. Selfishly, he wants to be with her for his own benefit as much as hers. "I've missed you, too," he says.

They talk for almost two hours, falling into an easy rhythm. It feels like she never left, like the distance between them is less.  

***

They return to the FBI after another week. She smiles at him like a supernova when he enters the office, quotes the cheesy line he'd fed her twenty-seven years ago. ( _Twenty-three_ , he rushes to mentally correct himself. How could he think it's twenty-seven?)

Two days later, she drives up to the house and they walk into the fields surrounding them holding hands like teenagers. It's warm outside - global warming or something - so they sit next to each other in the long grass, shoulders and arms pressed together. She squeezes his fingers, and he leans his head on her shoulder.

He's in the middle of a long story about research he’s been doing on a series of werewolf sightings when she cups his jaw, turning his face towards hers, and kisses him. He gasps into her mouth, twining his fingers in her hair to pull her closer.

Later, they're stretched out in their bed ( _their_ bed), curled around each other, and he asks what he should've asked weeks ago. "Come home?" he whispers into her shoulder.

She strokes his hair, and says what he wasn't expecting. "Yes."

***

Just when everything seems perfect (Scully goes home for a night to get her things ready to go home, and Mulder kisses her at the door, and they promise to see each other at work tomorrow), Mulder disappears.

Tad O'Malley showing her their home in shambles is almost too much. This was supposed to be over, they were moving back in together. It was going to be okay, she can’t help but think. And now Mulder is gone.

Scully calls him five times on the way back to the city. Something about this feels familiar, recent, but she dismisses it as a reflex from the past as well as stress left over from their shooting. She drives with one hand on the wheel, both eyes on the road, and the other trembling hand holding her cell phone on speaker as she listens to it ring _._ "Goddamnit, Mulder," she whispers. "This isn't how this is supposed to go. Answer me, please."

It seems to take longer than usual to get back to DC. Like she drives for hours on end, going nowhere, with the radio droning as background noise and the unanswered rings of her phone wavering in and out like a bad radio connection.

***

He’s driving and it takes him a while to remember where, remember why. At first he thinks _Oregon_ and then he remembers: the smoker. The man in his apartment. He has to hold back a groan at the reverberating aches, the feeling of what seems to be a virus building up beneath his skin. It feels like he’s been driving much longer than he should.

He has to get to Oregon. No - South Carolina. He has to get to South Carolina. There are ten missed calls from Scully on this phone, and he wants to answer them but driving seems more important at the moment.

He tries to remember why he's driving, and comes up with _the smoker, I have to see the smoker._ But by everything he remembers, the smoker is dead.

Mulder drives.

***

The world is ending, Monica Reyes is a traitor, and Mulder has gone off to chase Spender, who should definitely be dead. "This is ridiculous," Scully says out loud to her empty car, smacking the wheel with the heel of her hand. It feels like she's always driving now. “Something is wrong here."

She passes a _Welcome to Bellefleur_ sign and it takes a minute for her to realize that’s not right. Her eyes flick to the rearview mirror; it’s gone.

Scully pulls off to the side of the road and shuts off the car. Pressing her forehead into the wheel, she closes her eyes and mutters, “ _Fuck_.”

***

Agent Einstein helps her try to save the world and Agent Miller finds Mulder. She has to fight her way through looters and heavy traffic to get to him; the apocalypse has officially begun, four years too late. The irony is bitter.

“Where is he?” she gasps. Agent Miller motions her towards the open door of the car with a sweeping arm, and she rounds it, moving to crouch beside him. God, he looks awful. “Mulder... I’m here,” she says. She wants to kiss him with relief; she'd thought she was gonna lose him, again, have to survive the end of the world alone.

His face brightens at the sight of her. “He saved your life… Old Smokey,” he croaks. “I suppose I should thank him.”

“We’re gonna save your life,” she reassures him.

“Agent Miller... is also in trouble,” he says, coughing weakly. (The purported Agent Miller stands awkwardly behind them, looking like he feels he's intruding.)

“We’ll take care of Agent Miller. But right now, we’re gonna get an IV into you, okay?” she tries to soothe. He nods his confirmation. She stands, head spinning, and turns to face Miller. “He’s worse off than I thought,” she says gravely.

“Can you do anything for him?” Miller asks. The bridge spins around him, cars fading in and out. For a minute, they’re replaced with trees. Green forest, a starry sky unlike the murky night above her.

“What I can do might not help,” she says desperately. The bridge wavers, holds still. “He needs stem cells… and right now.”

“Stem cells from who?”

Their baby. William. “We have a child together… that child will be protected by his inheritance and my alien DNA.” She doesn’t know what she’s saying, she has a strange memory for a moment: her sitting on the exam table of a doctor’s room. _I’m pregnant, aren’t I,_ she says, twisting a ring around her finger. But that’s not what happened, that’s not what happened at all.

“We have to get to him,” Miller says.

“I don’t know where he is.” That’s true, in a sense, but it’s also not, because none of this is real. She realizes slowly and in a split second. They’re hallucinating, she and Mulder, they have to break out of it, they have to get away.

A light comes out of nowhere, cutting her off. She turns her face towards it. It is white and blinding. Suffocating. No.

She’s on a bridge and she’s in a forest and the beam is hovering over her. The abductees from Oregon are here, they’re older now, and she, she is younger. And it's not 2016, of course, how could she forget, it's 1997.

"Scully!" She whirls and sees Mulder's anguished, bruised face staring out from the car. She blinks, and she's back in the forest, and Mulder is running to catch up with her, his face white. "Scully," he gasps, but they both keep walking in the same direction as the other abductees. They need to run, she has things she needs to tell him, but the light is a powerful gut-tug and they can't move away. They move closer instead.

"Mulder," she says, because it's all she can say. They walk. His fingers brush her palm. _Your sister's alive, I found her,_ she tries to say. _We're going to have a baby. We need to run. Mulder._

They're on a bridge and in the Oregon woods all at once and the light won't let go. The light will swallow them whole.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone has ever wanted to read a nearly 8k plot explosion featuring characters who are, um, not mulder and scully, then this is your chapter. (two things: 1. i was halfway considering cutting this chapter bc i thought a switch in narration would break the rhythm but i ended up being glad i did because a) this was fun and b) so much important plot stuff, and 2. this may not feature mulder and scully very much but that doesn’t stop everyone from talking about them every other line so no worries. also, it was weird as shit to write scenes without one of them in it.)

**fourteen.**

When Samantha was little and still Samantha Mulder, she’d thought her house must be the smallest house in the world. It wasn’t true, of course - it was actually fairly big compared to the one she’d live in later - but it had seemed that way because of her brother. He’d seemed to take up so much space, running up and down the halls, bouncing basketballs off the walls and throwing baseballs through the windows (God, their dad had shouted at  _ that  _ one), sharp elbows jutting into her side as he’d shoved past and knocked whatever she was holding in her hands to the ground, his voice always too loud. She’d told her first mother she hated him, once, and her mother had shaken her head and said, “You shouldn’t say that, sweetheart. He might not be around someday.”

And she hadn’t believed her until she’d woken up in a strange room when she was eight, with her father’s friend smoking a cigarette, and he’d smiled and patted her on the head and told her she was very brave. “When can I go home?” she’d said. She hadn’t wanted to be brave, she wanted her bed and that stupid teddy bear Fox always made fun of and those cookies her mom made the other day (the ones she could only have one of at a time but Fox always had two and he’d probably give her two, too). 

“You can’t,” the smoker said. “You have to stay here, or your mom and dad will get in a lot of trouble. You don’t want them to get in trouble, do you?” 

He was using that little-kid voice grown-ups always did. Like she couldn't understand him. She scowled and kicked the end of the bed. “I guess not,” she said. “But what about Fox? Why doesn’t  _ he _ have to come here?” Or maybe he was here, she thought; maybe the light had taken him, too. The last thing she remembered was him shouting her name, the way he had when she’d fallen into the deep part of the lake before she could swim. (He’d yanked her out by her arm, and they’d both gotten yelled at for being irresponsible and had to stay in the house for the rest of the day, and her arm had hurt but he hadn’t called her a baby when she complained about it.)

Her father’s friend had gotten a funny look on his face. He sat for a minute before saying, "Your brother is... gone."

"Gone," she'd repeated. "Like... like how I'm gone?"

"No," her father's friend said solemnly, taking a drag on his cigarette. 

Samantha had gotten a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. This reminded her of the time her cat had died. "Gone like... dead?"

The smoker nodded.

The sick feeling increased, and she thought she might throw up. She slithered down under the covers and pulled the sheet over her head. "I'll let you rest," the smoker said, patting her head again through the blankets. His shoes clicked on the linoleum. Samantha pressed her face into the scratchy pillowcase and tried not to cry. And then she remembered when Fox had called her a baby whenever she cried and she couldn't help it then, so she sobbed quietly into the pillow.

Everything had seemed a lot bigger, from then on. Like the universe would just swallow her up.

***

Right after the gunshots had stopped, Samantha had heard the screeching of tires on the pavement. She popped up out of the bushes and yelled, "Scully!", even though it was a stupid thing to do. It didn't matter, anyway, because judging by the blank look on Scully's face as she sped away, she was under the control of the chip. 

Her gun still lay out on the pavement, and Samantha lunged for it. (Her second father, Max, had taught her how to shoot a gun when she turned seventeen: "I think it's an important skill to have, with our lives," he'd said. By which he’d meant the restrictions and annual abductions. They'd given her a gun for her eighteenth birthday, and she'd carried it until the day the Syndicate had caught her, somewhere in California.) She scooped the gun up, clutching it between her palms, and scrambled to her feet, stumbling a little as she stood. 

"Run away from home?" said the familiar sinewy voice from her childhood. The smoker stepped out from a car, the gun that was probably the one shooting at them dangling from his fingers. 

Rage bubbling up inside her, Samantha aimed the gun. "You bastard. What the hell were you trying to do?"

"Send a message," he said calmly. "I was hoping Agent Scully would run out of rounds and surrender. I didn't expect her chip to snap into effect that quickly. I expected it to be a few hours, at least, before she’d be headed for her abduction site. It’ll probably be a few hours before you do, though."

She squeezed the gun barrel, looking for some composure. "You knew that her chip was going to call her?" she said incredulously. "How? You don’t control the chips! And Scully wasn’t one of your hand picked abductees.”

"She wasn’t. We suspected, though. We've been tracking the extraterrestrials' movements, and they're touching down at most of the abduction sites this week. But this time, we're going to be ready for them." He paused ominously, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his chest pocket with his free hand.

"You're going to destroy them," Samantha said, realizing. Start a damn war that they couldn’t win. How fucking stupid were they, they didn’t know anything about the aliens. They would be demolished. It would be like every alien apocalypse movie ever, except no one would have any idea how to fight back because no one knew anything about the aliens. Because it was all classified. Goddamnit, the irony in this one was rich. Her brother would love it. 

"Destroy or be destroyed," the smoker said cheerfully, lighting his cigarette. “This charade has gone on long enough. We’re ready for it all to be over.”

Samantha felt the burn in her neck that she's been feeling since she was eight. Fuck, if she was called, there wouldn't be any way for her to get away and find Fox and Scully. "So why are you coming after me?" she snapped. "What does it matter if I've escaped? I think I've more than served my time. Over twenty-three years of my goddamn life." (She started when she realized that twenty-three years was how long Scully had said their NDE was.)

"We need to keep your father in place," the smoker said. "At least until this - hopefully brief - war is over."

_ Everyone thinks a war is going to be brief until they start it, _ Samantha thought.  _ You’ll destroy the world in your wake. Who are you to make these kinds of decisions without authorization? _ "That's bullshit."

"Whether it is or it isn't, I'm afraid we need you for just a little bit longer." The smoker raised his gun.

There was the click of a gun being cocked, and her first mother stepped behind him, holding a gun to his head. She was wearing a coat over her damn nightgown, flapping in the wind, and she looked like a little girl playing at being a grown-up. Samantha shivered. She had a lot of pent-up resentment for her parents, both of them. But now she was torn between yelling at her mother and running up to hang off of her like a little kid. "Mom," she said. 

"Teena…?" The smoker tried to turn around. She pressed the barrel of the gun hard into his cheek. Her hand was shaking; her mom had always been terrified of guns. Her father keeping one in the house, even in a locked box (that had only made things worse when their son was trying to save their daughter from aliens), had spurned what had seemed like a thousand of their millions of arguments. Samantha was surprised she'd even picked one up, much less pointed it at someone.

"You’ve betrayed this family enough," her mother said.  She addressed Samantha: "Are you alright, sweetheart?"

Samantha lowered Scully's gun as well. "Fine," she said. She'd dealt with worse, actually. 

Sirens wailed in the distance. Of course someone had called the fucking police; gun battles don't go unnoticed, especially in the middle of a neighborhood. When the Syndicate had found her in a little cafe in California, they’d staged an arrest so as not to attract too much attention. Samantha tried not to let her hands shake, swallowing hard. Solitary confinement terrified her.

“We need to go,” her mother said. The smoker tried to say something, and she whacked him, hard, in the back of the head. He slumped to the ground, unconscious. Samantha gaped at her; she’d never known her mother could do anything like this. “Come on, sweetheart,” her mother said. “We need to leave before the police get here.”

With no other choice, she clutched Scully’s gun in her hand and ran after her, around the block to where her mother had left her car so fast that her lungs burned.

"Where's Dana?" her mother asked when they got in the car.

"Chip. She left." (She realized only later that her mother might know about the chips, but she didn't care.) 

Her mother nodded. Her eyes were a little wild, and she was breathing just as hard as Samantha, if not worse. "And you don't know where Fox is?" 

"We couldn’t ask. Dad wasn't there, I think," Samantha said, chewing her lip. She didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad sign. She didn't know if she cared. "Did you follow us?"

"Yes," she said simply, and didn't elaborate. 

They drove without talking any more for a minute; Samantha had absolutely no idea where they were going. Or what her next move needed to be. There was really only one logical option, though. "I need to borrow some money, Mom," she said. "I need to rent a car and drive back to DC." Her mother opened her mouth, assumedly to protest, and she snarled, "I need to go and save your  _ son _ ." 

Her mother's jaw clenched, but she nodded. They drove to a nearby car rental place in silence where she paid for a car and set aside some money for gas. 

"Thank you," Samantha said awkwardly when they exited the building. She didn't know what else to say. She had nothing to say and everything to say, and this didn't seem like the time. She needed to save her brother. 

"Will you be careful, sweetheart?" her mother said.

A lump built up in her throat. "I will," she said. "I promise." She hugged her mother briefly and kissed her papery cheek. "You be careful, too," she added. She was surprised at her mother's methodicalness, her calm in doing this. Maybe she’d learned something from years with her father, from whatever her relationship was to the smoker (because Samantha sure as hell knew there had been more than wife of business colleague and business colleague). 

"You've grown so much," her mother said, smoothing back a wild strand of hair. "I wish I'd been there to see it."

Samantha tried not to cry as she walked away, car keys cutting into her sweaty palm.

***

She'd learned to drive at the normal time, but had to wait to get her license until after she'd gone to college. (Permission by the Syndicate; it was close by so they could watch her. She'd failed several classes because of her abductions.) Still, she likes driving. After she had left her mother to deal with the police, she'd driven back to Scully's sister's house methodically in a new-smelling old-looking rental. She turned the radio all the way up to drown out her thoughts.

It didn't work, completely. Her thoughts kept turning back to Fox. The fact that her twelve-year-old brother had grown up seemed absolutely foreign to her, let alone the fact that he'd become an FBI agent who had apparently spent years looking for her, who went by Mulder, and had a badass wife who he called Scully, and carried a gun. She couldn't stop picturing the kid who'd teased her and had said,  _ Get out of my life, _ right before she... well, had. (Which, she didn't resent him for. She remembered being twelve, quiet and moody and angry at the world. And it was hard to resent him for anything when she'd thought him dead.)

She bought a pocket knife in Pennsylvania, when she stopped to get gas, and considered cutting out the chip in the backseat of the rental car. She was terrified she would be called. But then again, there was a lot more risk, driven by the fact that she couldn’t actually see what she was doing, and she still wasn’t sure what taking out the chip would do to her. And if she bled out in Pennsylvania because she cut too deep or in the wrong place, she wouldn’t be able to find Fox and Scully. So in the end, she dropped the pocket knife in her pocket, in case she lost the gun, and kept on driving, waiting for a hallucination to overtake her. But none did.

Somehow, she managed to find Melissa's house. It was getting dark when she got there, stars streaking over the sky, and she felt limp, exhausted. She hadn't slept well since before her second parents died, before she went on the run and was held captive and went on this crazy search for her brother. (She certainly hadn’t slept well the night before, tossing and turning in the strange bed, worrying about her not-dead brother and the Syndicate finding them and seeing her mother again.)

Melissa paled when she opened the door."Samantha?" she said, frantic. "Where's Dana?"

"She's, um," Samantha said awkwardly.

A man appeared behind Melissa. "The chip?" he asked knowingly. 

He didn't particularly look like a member of the Syndicate - the fuckers always wore suits, and he was wearing worn jeans and a t-shirt, apart from the fact that his eyes were the same as Melissa’s and Scully’s - so Samantha nodded. "The chip forced her to leave," she said apologetically. "I'm so sorry. There was nothing I could do.”

Melissa groaned, a pallor that made her look vaguely sick to the stomach coming over her. The man looked just as panicked at her words. " _ Shit _ ," she muttered fiercely, rubbing her temple with one hand. "Shit, um… Come on in, Samantha. Charlie, this is Dana’s boyf- I mean husband's sister. Samantha, this is my brother, Charlie. He's apparently also an abductee." She sounded like someone who had just experienced an incredibly long day, bitter and angry. (Samantha knew the feeling.)

"You're an abductee?" Charlie asked. Samantha nodded. "Take out your chip," he said in a rush. "It won't hurt you."

"It won't?"

"I've had mine out for years and been fine," he said. "And apparently, there's a war about to start, and abductees are the bait. According to my father, at least. He has connections or some shit."

"That's what I've heard," she said. "I don't suppose either of you are also doctors?" 

"No," Melissa said miserably. "That's Dana’s forte."

"I took mine out," Charlie said. "I can do it safely. I'll help you." 

The chip was burning again. Samantha tried to focus. "Fox and Scully," she said. "Er, Dana. How do we save them? From what you're saying and what I’ve heard, it sounds like they're going to be right in the line of fire." Melissa made a muffled sound behind her hand.

"Exactly," Charlie said grimly. "Dad said he was going to call Dana’s boss or something like that. Why, I don't know... maybe he thinks someone who heads the kind of department they're in will believe anything?"

" _ I _ can't believe this," Melissa growled. "I can't believe any of it. Well, I mean, the aliens I can believe, but what I can’t believe is you. Why would no one ever tell me? You or Dana. Does Bill know?"

"Bill doesn't know, God forbid. He only worships the ground Dad walks on," Charlie said bitterly. "Although if he's in government work, They might pull him in sooner or later. That's how They work. Dad said he never wanted to be involved, but They forced him. He's in the fucking Navy, for God's sake. What does he know about aliens? They’re fueling their bullshit cause and hurting everyone more.”

"They're going to lose," Samantha said. They both turned to look at her, and she felt studiously uncomfortable. "The Syndicate, I mean," she added. "They have no idea what the aliens are like."

Melissa looked confused, but Charlie nodded, a knowing look on his face. "That's why Dana and your brother have to get out of there," he said. "Come in here, and I'll get the chip out. Missy, do you mind if we use your couch?"

"Of course not, why would I mind blood everywhere," Melissa growled, turning away and walking down the hall. “I’m not mad at you, Samantha, by the way,” she called back over her shoulder. “Apparently my family is built on lies.”

"I’ve had over a decade to deal with this stuff, and I’m still pissed off about it, Miss. Get some cotton balls, a small knife, and a Band-Aid, would you?" Charlie called after her. "And tweezers." Samantha followed him into the living room warily. "It'll just take a small cut," Charlie said. "The chip's shallowly under the skin. It shouldn’t hurt too much. If you know what you're doing, you won't bleed all over the place. I know because I did."

"What about Fox and Scully?" Samantha asked. (She'd gotten strangely attached to her apparent sister-in-law.)

"We have to go to the place where they were first abducted," Charlie said. "That's where the chip sends them."

Samantha shook her head. "It doesn't," she said. "At least, mine didn't."

Charlie shrugged. "Maybe you were a special case."

"That would make sense."  _ She'd _ been a special case, leverage for her father, and besides that, it was the best lead they had. Samantha twisted her thick hair up into a knot to expose the back of her neck. "They were abducted on their first case," she added.

"Here," Melissa said, entering the room. She passed Samantha a hair tie.

"Thanks," Samantha said, in the same slightly amazed way she had as a reflex when someone was nice to her. Captivity did something to you. 

"No problem. Be careful," she said to Charlie, fiercely like she knew Samantha well. 

He made a face at her - the traditional don't underestimate me look of a younger sibling. "Missy, do you where Dana’s first case was?"

She wrinkled her nose. "I don't remember."

"Some sister you are."

"Says the brother who left without a word," Melissa retorted bitterly. 

Charlie turned away, looking slightly hurt, and quietly asked Samantha if she was ready.

It hurt, but it wasn't the worst pain she'd ever dealt with. She started to hallucinate just before Charlie got the chip out; it was Fox, who hadn't been featured in her hallucinations since she was ten, at least. He was still twelve, and was standing over her, hand out to help her up. "Come on," he said impatiently.

"I can't," Samantha said, closing her eyes against it. 

"We've gotta go," he snapped. 

"I'm not eight anymore, and you're not twelve," she said. 

"We'll always be eight and twelve," he said. "Now, come  _ on _ . You're going to make us late, you little pest!"

Despite herself, she smiled. Something tugged in the back of her neck, and everything went black for a moment.

When she woke up, she was propped up on Melissa's couch, the back of her neck stinging. "Are you okay?" Melissa asked, feeling her forehead with the back of her hand.

Samantha nodded, trying to remember how she ended up on a stranger's couch, letting them cut into her neck. Her brother, that was how. Maybe this was a long-winded cycle of making up for all the trouble he'd gone to looking for her. "What's our next move?" she asked.

"I thought we should go to Fox and Dana’s apartment and see if they have anything there," Melissa said. "They're weird, maybe they have a-a-a record or something. Like a photo album but for monsters. Call my parents, maybe, and see if they know where Dana’s first case was. They probably will, she was in a car accident while she was there. Or if they don't, Bill will."

"I need to go, actually," Charlie said. 

Melissa stared at him with some unexplainable anger on her face. "I can't fucking believe you."

"Missy, I'm sorry," he said. "But I have a family. I have a son. I can't run into gunfire like this. I'm not an FBI agent."

_ Neither are we, _ Samantha would point out if she had any place in this conversation. 

"Dad said he was calling the FBI," he added. "I'd say you getting the information is enough, you can give it to them and let them do their job."

Melissa's face was stony. "Dana is your  _ sister _ ," she hissed. "And you're not the only one with a family."

"What the hell does that mean? We all have families, Missy," Charlie snapped. 

Melissa's face flickered, like she was considering whether or not to tell him something, and then it was stony again. "Fine. Whatever. Do what you want, Charlie."

Charlie's face softened. "Missy, I'm sorry," he added. "For a lot of things."

She nodded, and Charlie left. 

Later, when they were in the car, Melissa said, "We don't need him," with a fierce, half-determined rejection. "Screw him. Dad may have been an asshole or whatever, and I'm not completely filled in on all that, and I'm sure Thanksgiving will be awkward as hell, but he shouldn't have left me and Dana without a word."

Overwhelmed, Samantha nodded silently. She could use a fucking nap.

Melissa hesitated before she added, "I thought you should know about something. Dana's pregnant."

Stunned, Samantha felt a little like she'd been hit by a truck. She'd been dragging a pregnant woman all over the country and getting her shot at? Her brother who was permanently twelve in her mind was going to be a father? Well, only if they could figure this out. Maybe they wouldn't. "Oh-okay," she stammered. 

(She needed a  _ ten-hour _ nap when this all was done. And an entire carton of ice cream.)

Melissa put the car into drive and rolled out of the driveway. "Dana's gonna kill me when she found out I told you," she added, fiercely, like the possibility that Scully  _ wouldn't _ be able to get mad didn't exist. Like she'd read Samantha's mind. "Brace yourself."

***

"Oh," Melissa said suddenly as they reached the apartment. "Dana never gave me a key.”

Well, Samantha obviously didn't have one. "Do you have a bobby pin?" she asked.

"Oh, here." Melissa dug through her purse until she came up with one and passed it over. "You know how to pick a lock?" 

"Sure," Samantha said, hunching over the doorknob, using the skills she'd taught herself as a bored ten-year-old with nothing to do on the base they'd kept her on; there had barely been any other kids there, and as nice as Max and Rose had been, it had taken them a while for them to warm up to her. (They'd been withdrawn, lost in grief from the death of her daughter, and had seen Samantha as a replacement as much as she saw them as a replacement for her first parents. They'd been happy, eventually, but it had taken a while for their wounds to heal enough to open up.)

"My brothers knew how," Melissa noted. "They used to break into my closet. They taught Dana, and she broke into theirs in revenge."

Samantha laughed. The door gave way under her hands, swinging open slowly. 

As they stepped in, a footstep creaked over the floorboards, and Samantha fumbled for Scully's gun in her waistband. "Who's there?" a low voice said. 

Samantha swung the gun around, the butt slipping in her sweaty hands so much she almost dropped it. The kitchen light flicked on, revealing a trio of guys standing there. "Who the hell are you?" the shortest one said.

"This is my sister's apartment," Melissa snapped. "Who the hell are you?"

"Wait, you're Scully's sister?" the one in a suit asked. "Melinda, right?"

"Melissa."

"Right, sorry. We're... friends of Mulder's," the suit said. 

"Who's she? Another FBI agent?" the one with long blonde hair asked, pointing at Samantha. 

They clearly weren't armed - or weren't going to shoot if they were - so Samantha lowered her gun. "I'm Fox's sister."

The three of them stared in total shock. "You're... you're Samantha?" the short one asked, finally. Samantha nodded, awkwardly. Of course they would know, if they were friends of her brother. "Holy shit," he said, quietly. 

"Do you know where they are?" Melissa asked.

"We've been tracking them, actually," the suited man said. "We think they're headed to Oregon."

"That was where Mulder was headed when we tracked him down last," the short man added. 

It still felt like she was following the breadcrumb trail of her brother, but never actually seeing him. Is this how he had felt, all these years, looking for her? At least now they knew where he and Scully were headed.

Out of nowhere, the blonde one snorted. "We have a Mulder and a Scully. We just have the wrong ones."

***

The three men were Frohike, Langly, and Byers, apparently called themselves the Lone Gunmen, and were conspiracy-theorists/hackers who distrusted the government exactly the right amount, if not more, which was comforting. The five of them made something of a silent pact to work together. They sat at Fox and Scully’s kitchen table and talked strategy. 

"We'll need to fly out to Oregon to beat them there," Byers said. "But I'm guessing we have some time since they're driving."

"That's good," Samantha said, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips. "I need some sleep. I'm exhausted."

Melissa drummed her fingers on the table anxiously. "So we're just going to fly out there and try to keep Fox and Dana from dying? What about the other people?"

Frohike cleared his throat uncomfortably. "I don't think there's anything we can do."

"That's ridiculous," Melissa said, angrily.

Samantha touched the other woman on the shoulder. "Melissa, I've seen plenty of people who get run roughshod by these people," she said softly. "They killed my parents - the people who raised me after my abduction. They abducted our siblings. The best you can hope for, at least at the moment, is to save the people you love." That probably made her a terrible person, but she'd been fighting for years and gained.

Melissa slumped in her seat. "You three," she said, twisting her crystal choker in her fingers and looking at the Gunmen. "You're fighting them, right? You can release some evidence or something?"

"We would if we had anything substantial," Langly said, regretfully.

"We've been fighting this for years with no avail," Frohike added. "It's dangerous."

Melissa groaned, putting her head down. "This entire thing is fucked up," she mumbled. 

"We know, Miss Scully," Byers said. "Believe me." 

There was really nothing left to say after that. They agreed to call Fox's boss in the morning and get the location of their first case. Melissa took the bed and Samantha took the couch. The Gunmen hovered around the table, refusing to sleep, blue lights glowing in the dark kitchen. Samantha shoved her face into a throw pillow and slept the sleep of the dead.

***

When she woke up, the blonde one, Langly, was shooting her a smile that she was fairly sure was him flirting. (She had no idea  _ why _ he was flirting; she had probably snored into a pillow all night. And drooled.) “Morning, sunshine,” he said cheerfully.

Frohike whacked him in the arm. “Idiot. That’s  _ Mulder’s sister _ . Do you want him to murder you?”

(Samantha almost burst out laughing as she shoved the blankets away and sat up; her brother was a formless concept at this point, but she still thought the idea of him beating up his friends for flirting with her was absurd.)

“Says the man who was in love with his  _ girlfriend _ ,” Langly shot back with annoyance, jabbing him in the ribs. 

“Shut up,” Frohike hissed, hitting him back, eyes shooting over to Melissa, who rolled her own eyes at Samantha. 

“Stop it, both of you,” Byers said. “We’ve got more important things going on right now.” 

To their credit, both of them managed to look embarrassed. Melissa stood from her spot at the table. “Coffee?” she asked Samantha.

“Please,” Samantha said, shoving hair out of her eyes. The two-year forced withdrawal from coffee that been miserable; she’d drank it like water before.

Melissa got out a mug from the cabinet. “I’m just picturing Fox and Dana’s reaction when they come home and discover that we’ve eaten all their food and drank all their coffee," she said, motioning spastically with her mug in a probable attempt to indicate that they'd be pissed.

“You know, it’s weird that you call them that,” Frohike commented.

“What, call my sister by her given name? I think it’s weird that you call her by her last name,” Melissa shot back. 

“Her boyfriend calls her that,” Langly pointed out. 

“And it’s  _ weird _ .” Melissa shook the mug before settling down and pouring the dark liquid into it.

Samantha came into the kitchen, taking the mug. Secretly, she thought the entire thing was kind of weird. But not necessarily in a bad way. 

A pounding knock came at the door out of nowhere. “Agent Mulder!” a man shouted through the door. “Agent Scully!” 

The five of them froze in the kitchen. “Who’s that?” Melissa hissed under her breath. 

“It could be someone from the FBI,” Byers replied quietly. “He called them Agents.”

Behind them, the pounding continued. The man was shouting for them to open up. It was making Samantha feel nervous, claustrophobic. Like she was back in her cell, and the walls were closing in on her. 

“Or it could be a trick,” Frohike replied. “The wrong people from the FBI.”

The other four were staring at each other, completely unsure of what to do. Samantha tried to steady her breathing and not freak out. 

There was a sharp sound, like kicking, and the door swung open. A large bald man came in with his gun drawn, followed by a man and woman in a similar position. The Gunmen put their hands up, quickly. Melissa dropped her mug, startled. Samantha gripped the chair in front of her and tried not to scream. 

The bald man froze, staring at them. “Who the hell are you?” 

“Not this again,” Langly muttered under his breath.

Melissa was the first one to speak. “I’m Dana’s - er, Agent Scully’s - sister. Are you… Walter Skinner? Her boss?”

“Yes,” the bald man said, uncertainly. Behind him, the other two agents lowered their weapons. “We got a tip that Mulder and Scully had been abducted. Do you…” He hesitated, gestured vaguely. “... all know anything about that?”

Something in Samantha’s chest released, and she felt like she could breathe again. “I’m Agent Mulder’s sister,” she said. The same surprised expression she’d gotten used to seeing dawned on Walter Skinner’s face. “I think I can fill you in.”

***

There was another awkward introduction before the brigade that was slowly growing larger and larger settled down in the living room to clear things up. (Skinner introduced the agents with him as, “Agents Doggett and Reyes. You can trust them.”) Samantha explained her experience as best she could, with the Gunmen cutting in to provide information of their own. (Byers looked nervous the entire time, keeping mostly quiet and fiddling with his tie, except to offer up information he had from a woman he refused to name.) Melissa offered up what little information she had - that her father, a Navy man, had been forced to give up his youngest son for abduction, who had eventually taken out his chip. 

By the end of it, Skinner looked uncomfortable, but he also looked like he believed them. “This is ridiculous,” said the male agent, Doggett. “What proof do you have of aliens?”

“Personal experience,” Samantha said. 

“We have some proof of our own, as well as of the conspiracy,” Frohike added.

Doggett turned to Skinner. “Are you buying any of this, Assistant Director?” he demanded. 

Skinner looked as if he was deep in thought. “I’ve thought a lot of things Mulder and Scully have sent across my desk was bullshit,” he said. “But this… this, I can’t deny. I’ve seen too much proof of it over the years. In the people I’ve dealt with personally, and the things I’ve seen Mulder and Scully go through. I know there's a conspiracy. And with two of my best agents in danger... I can't afford to ask questions."

“You helped them get out of prison,” Byers said, seriously. “You must’ve known there was something off.”

Skinner nodded. He turned towards Samantha, addressing her directly. “Miss Mulder?”

It was still strange to be called that, after years of being a Rutherford. “Yes, sir?” she said gingerly. 

“After all this is over, I’ll do my best to make sure you get justice for everything that’s happened for you,” he said. “Including the death of your caretakers. Would you be willing to testify against everything you’ve experienced?”

She had to - for her family, for revenge for her second parents. “Yes,” she said. 

He nodded. “We’ll need to figure all of this out,” he said. “The conspiracy, how to expose it. But I think that’s a job that Agents Mulder and Scully will be crucial in. And for now, we need to make sure they, and hopefully nobody else, won’t die in the midst of all this." He scratched the back of his neck, uncomfortable. "You said that… these people… go back to the places where they’ve formerly been abducted?” 

Samantha nodded. “From my knowledge, they’ll focus on mass abduction sites,” she said. “Was their first case a mass abduction case?”

“Yes, in Bellefleur, Oregon.” Skinner paused. “Agent Doggett, Agent Reyes, I’d like you to fly out to Bellefleur, as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Agent Reyes said immediately. Doggett looked mildly uncomfortable, but he didn’t protest.

“What are you going to be doing, sir?” Melissa wanted to know.

“Doing my best to stop all this." Skinner sighed, shaking his head. "Your father was the one to contact me, right? How much information would he have?” 

“I’m not sure, but he’d help,” she said. “My brother, Charlie, could help, too. I think he’s still in town.” 

"Okay," Skinner said. "Okay, I'm going to go now. Doggett, Reyes, I need you on the next flight to Oregon."

"Yes, sir," Reyes said immediately. Doggett nodded. 

"Good," Skinner said, running a hand over his face. He still sounded awkward, like he didn't know how to process any of this. "How the hell do these two get into this much trouble," he muttered to himself before muttering some goodbyes and leaving. 

"Okay," Doggett said awkwardly in Skinner's absence, standing from his spot on the couch. "Thank you for the tip. We'll call you if you want when we find them..."

"Wait, we're coming with you," Melissa said, matter-of-factly. Simply, no room for argument.

"You can't," Doggett said. 

"Yes, we can. We're family," she replied simply, crossing her arms over her chest. (Samantha was a little surprised that she included the Gunmen - but then again, they seemed close enough to Fox that she doubted he'd mind.)

"This is FBI business," Doggett tried in a sympathetic, firm way.

"Listen, buddy, we're going up there with your permission or not," Frohike said loudly, more confidently than he probably felt. "That was our plan all along."

Doggett looked like he wanted to say more, but Reyes interrupted him. "Look, John, what could it hurt to have them fly up there with us?" she asked, getting to her feet and laying a hand on his arm. "It's their right. Their siblings and friends in the balance."

Doggett sighed. "All right," he said. "But I don't want you interfering with the investigation."

"Yes, sir," Byers said quickly. He gave Frohike and Langly a meek but firm  _ this-is-what-will-get-us-places _ look when they glared at him.

"Thank you," Melissa said, a stunned sort of gratefulness.

Reyes smiled and extended her hand towards her. "Monica Reyes, by the way."

"Melissa Scully," she said, shaking it.

***

They get caught in a layover at the airport that takes seven hours, but Frohike reassures an anxious Melissa and Samantha by showing them the tracking devices on Scully’s and Fox’s cars. “Mulder’s closer, but there’s plenty of time before they get there,” he says. “We’ll be fine. Between this layover and this flight, we’ll get there around the time they do.”

The words seem to calm Melissa considerably. Then she lays into Frohike for having trackers on her sister’s car.

“We thought it might be convenient if anything ever happened to them,” he says, meekly. “And look. We were right.”

The plane ride just takes a couple hours. The FBI agents make Samantha tense at first, but she relaxes eventually; Doggett seems suspicious, but nice enough aside from that, and Reyes is increasingly sweet. She and Melissa hit it off. ("I've always admired Agent Mulder and your sister," she says. "Their work on the X-Files. I studied mythology and folklore in college." "Is that why Skinner brought you?" Melissa asks. "Probably," Reyes says, half laughing.) The Gunmen keep mostly to themselves. Samantha relaxes enough to fall asleep for most of the plane ride. 

There is an awkward, wordless exchange between Doggett and Reyes on whether they should take the other five or not. Reyes finally suggests, out loud, that they rent a car and see what they can do. They rent a large van that is decidedly un-FBI looking. Doggett ends up driving and Samantha ends up in the passenger seat. Even though it feels pointless and juvenile, she scans the roads for any sign of Scully or Fox.

Bellefleur, Oregon is brisk and tastes like the salt air. Doggett and Reyes insist on going to the local police station.They both disappear inside, and don't reappear for almost half an hour. Melissa gets restless, muttering under her breath and drumming her fingers on the center console. Her anxiousness resembles the twisting of Samantha's insides into a tight, worried knot. "Local police aren't going to be any help," Doggett says when they get into the car, annoyed. "A Detective Miles got real anxious and barreled out of there, but the rest of them just were unresponsive."

"All we got is that the abductions were in the woods," Reyes says. 

"Well, let's go out there!" Frohike says insistently. "They're here, they've been here for hours."

Doggett starts the car. "Our objective is to get the abductees in and out," he says as they drive towards the forest."Agent Reyes and I will go into the woods. You five stay in the car."

"What?" Melissa spits. 

"We can't take civilians into a dangerous area," Reyes says gently. "I'm sorry." Her eyes meet Melissa's regretfully.

"We've been in dangerous situations for most of our lives," Langly says bitterly. "I knew we shouldn’t have trusted other Feds."

Doggett snorts, looking at them the rearview mirror. Samantha’s hand brushes over the butt of Scully's gun. She hates feeling this helpless. Hates it.

"I promise we'll get your friends out safely," Doggett says, not unkindly. "We just can't be worried about you all when we're in this thing fighting."

Melissa mutters something vicious under her breath. The Gunmen are silent, except when Byers offers up a, "Their cars are parked at the edge of the woods."

Doggett pulls to a stop on the side of the road. Ahead of them, an orange X is on the road. Further ahead, two cars sit abandoned. Samantha recognizes the one Scully had left her in. "That's them," Frohike says.

Doggett and Reyes pull their guns and get out of the car. Suddenly, light streams through the window. Samantha claps a hand to the back of her neck, but the telltale buzzing isn't there. She lets down the window and sticks her head out. A UFO hovers over the treetops.

Reyes's face is open and full of wonder. "Holy mother of God," Doggett says, hushed and bewildered. The two of them sprint into the woods.

Melissa's face is just as full of wonder as Reyes's. "Wow," she whispers.

"If only Mulder were here to see this," Langly says. The three of them are clustered around the window.

"He is," Frohike snaps. "That's the problem."

Samantha sticks her head further back, craning her head to watch. Something launches into the sky, hitting the ship in the side. It falters, almost turning completely on its side. Samantha sucks in a breath, biting down on her lip hard enough to draw blood. The ship rights itself and fires back.

"No!" Melissa's hand hits the window. Samantha fumbles for the door handle. A section of the woods explodes into flames.

"Call the fire department," Samantha gasps, shoving the door open. She nearly falls out. 

Melissa jumps out beside her, scrambling across the grass. "Dana!" she shouts. 

Above them, a beam shoots down. Samantha wants to scream. 

Doggett and Reyes appear and the edge of the woods with a cluster of teenagers. They have the glazed-over look of the chip; one tries to turn and go back into the woods. "Melissa, stay back!" Reyes yells. "There's still some more in there, we're going back in! We'll find them!" 

Melissa ignores her, barreling into the woods calling her sister's name. Samantha follows, yanking Scully’s gun out.

Her throat burns with smoke. Above them, the Syndicate floats into the light.

Her brother had shouted her name when she'd floated into the light. He'd tried to get her father's gun. He'd tried to save her. Samantha blinks in the orange haze, gripping her sister-in-law's gun.  _ Dana _ , Melissa screams beside her.

"Fox!" Samantha calls.   
***

Scully walks towards the light. She reaches for Mulder's hand, but she can't move it.  _ This can't happen, _ she wants to say.  _ This can't happen to us.  _

The ground shakes. The beam moves off of them. Everything goes black.

When Scully comes to, she's lying prone on the ground, hair hanging over her face. Smoke chokes her throat. Flames are everywhere. She pulls herself off the ground, scanning the bright of the forest. She stumbles to her feet, staggering forward. She thinks she hears her name on the wind:  _ Dana! _

Then she sees him.  

"Mulder," she whispers, going down on her knees beside him. He mumbles something that might be her name, face turning into the dirt. 

She reaches for him and the world shifts around her: Mulder crumpled in a field, Mulder bleeding out in an alley, Mulder slumped over in a car seat, soaked with sweat, dying. She hauls him into her arms, onto her lap. He curls around her, burying his face in her neck. The heat's all around her but she can't move them both. "I need help," she calls, weakly, but her voice is a strangled rasp. Mulder whimpers against her throat. She presses her face into his ashy hair. 

They end up stretched out on the ashy grass, the same forest where they'd met. She holds him closer, kissing his forehead, his hair. She can't move, but she needs to. Mulder. The baby. "Help," she croaks, trying to scream. 

"Scully?" An unfamiliar/familiar voice. She crawls fully on top of Mulder in an attempt to protect him before she recognizes it. "Jesus Christ," Samantha murmurs, hooking her hands under her armpits and hauling her up.

"Dana!" Missy's voice, but she can't be here. She tries to tell her that, but coughs instead. She stumbles to the side, unable to stand upright.

"Melissa, can you help her out of here?" Samantha says from somewhere near her. "Fox? Fox, you have to wake up. We have to go."

Scully feels her arm hooked over her older sister's shoulders as she's dragged out of the burning forest. Her vision is spotty and her breathing is harsh.

It all begins in Oregon, or ends in Oregon, and they are dead, they are alive, and Mulder’s being taken, and she’s kissing him in a hotel room, and the light is washing them out, swallowing them whole. It’s Oregon, goddamn Oregon. It’s always been Oregon.

She and William walk up the sunny path to his school, hand in hand. “First day of school. You nervous?” she asks her son, all bright eyes and messy hair. He shakes his head, practically bouncing with eagerness. He is at the stage where school is still an exciting adventure. “Your hands are sweaty,” she teases, shaking their joined hands between them.

He yanks his away, studying his palm with scrutiny. “Ew! That's you!”

She laughs, turning to face him - her son, in all his first-grade-glory. “What's the most important thing to remember?”

“Sit still, listen, say excuse me when you fart,” he ticks off proudly.

She laughs again - William is his father's son. And hers, her miracle. “The most important thing to remember... is that I love you. That's all you have to remember.” She leans forward and presses a kiss to his forehead.

He's looking at her seriously when she pulls back - his Scully look, Mulder calls it. “There's something you have to remember, too, Mommy.”

“What's that?” she teases, pushing his hair back.

“That this is realer than you think.”

Boggs said the same thing to her in a warehouse one time, and this isn't… “Oh, God,” she whispers, falling to her knees in front of William and hugging him tightly. “This isn't real. You aren't real. My baby, this is all in my head.”

“I'm realer than you think,” William says in his small voice, drawing back and pressing his fingers to her abdomen, a feather touch, and this, this is where the earth falls out from beneath her. “I love you, Mommy.” He kisses her forehead. 

Something shifts and pulls and tugs in the back of her neck, and then a triumphant voice: “Got it out.”

“William,” she whispers, darkness swirling like a living entity, real and malevolent, swallowing her whole. Her son is here but he isn't real and she's going to have a baby. Oh, God, she's going to have a baby. “William.”


	15. Chapter 15

**fifteen.**

_ How do you know? _ Scully had asked him after the Boggs case (in the other place, not the place he thinks must be real). _ What’s real and what’s not, I mean. _

She’d been reading a book and he’d been pretending to nap, and she’d said it, and it sounded like more entertainment then napping, so he’d scooted upright against the pillows, winced against the pain in his leg, and turned to look at her.  _ I just know,  _ he said.

She made a face, setting her book facedown in her lap.  _ Okay, but _ how  _ do you know? _

(They sounded like the little girls, the Eves:  _ how did you know what to do, _ he'd asked them when they'd dropped them off at the asylum, and they'd chorused,  _ we just knew. _ )

_ I just do, _ he said.  _ How do you know that everything I say is real isn’t? _

_ Science _ , she said simply. (He could’ve asked about Boggs, but she’d made it clear yesterday, with the sudden stiff shape of her shoulders and the clipped way she said,  _ It’s late, I have to go  _ when he'd tried to get her to discuss it again. She didn’t want to talk about it. Fair, there was plenty he didn’t want to talk about.)

_ Okay _ , he said.  _ Well, you have science, then. I have beliefs. I get a… feeling, and I know whether something is real or not. _

_ Are you claiming to be psychic? _ she asked, raising an eyebrow, smirking.  _ Is that how you knew Boggs wasn’t? _

He smirked back.  _ I didn’t say that. I said I just knew _ .

She nodded, waited a beat before opening her book again. He supposed that meant she was finished with the conversation.

She turned pages for a few minutes before saying,  _ So it’s… wish fulfillment? If you want something to be true hard enough, then it will be? _

_ That’s not what I said either, _ he said, slightly annoyed now. 

Scully looked at him from over the top of the book.  _ But you want to believe, _ she said, quietly. 

The damn poster. He nodded, because he couldn’t exactly say no.  _ I want to believe. So I do. _

***

He wakes up. 

Frohike is leaning over him, and he whoops with excitement when he sees him. "He's awake!" he shouts over his shoulder to a fuzzy Langly and Byers. 

Mulder blinks muzzily, swallowing against the burn in his throat. He has no idea what year it is. Beside him, he hears something from Byers about calling the doctor.

He lifts his hand and smiles at the sight of the ring on his hand.  _ There is no way this thing should still be on my hand, _ he thinks fondly.

"Your chip's gone," Langly says, out of his line of sight, and he turns his head to look at him. "It won't hurt you. Scully's brother confirmed it."

The chip is gone. Which means this is real, isn't it? They've had flashbacks since they've gotten here, which is also the amount of time they've had the chips. But now the chips are gone. Is this real? Will they stay here?

Mulder nods, clearing his throat. "Scully?" he rasps. 

"She's fine," Byers says quickly. "She's in the room down the hall."

He closes his eyes with surging relief. He doesn't care where they are as long as she's okay there.

Outside, the doctor taps on the door frame before entering. He's the same one who treated them in 1993 (the second one). "Mr. Mulder, it's good to see you're awake," he says cheerfully. "You and your partner certainly get in a lot of trouble, don't you?" 

(Frohike snorts, and Mulder shoots him a look.) 

"You're doing fine," the doctor continues. "You weren't in the woods for very long, and you were both on the ground, so the smoke inhalation wasn't too severe."

Mulder nods, struggling to sit up. Frohike and Byers reach out to help him, straightening a pillow behind his back. "Can I see my partner?" he asks.  _ Wife _ , he mentally corrects.

"That should be fine, as long as you don't exert yourself too much. She's right down the hall. We'd like to keep you under observation for a while; we're still trying to figure out the effects of the chip we removed from your neck." The doctor clears his throat, folding his hands over his stomach. "There was some unusual brain activity right after we removed it, but it ceased after a couple of hours."

That explains what he saw in between the burning forest and here. He'd seen a scene that had never happened: William, older than he'd ever known him, out in the yard with toy rockets. Standing out on the sun-drenched grass with his face turned up towards the sky.  _ I'm gonna go up there someday, _ he'd said. It makes his chest ache. "I think there were some hallucinogens in the chip," he supplies. "You didn't… throw it away, did you?"

"No, we gave it to the FBI agents who brought you here," the doctor says. "I'll send a nurse in here to check you over, Mr. Mulder, but you should be fine to go over and visit your partner, okay?"

Mulder nods, turning to stare at the Gunmen as the doctor leaves. "Who brought us in? Skinner?"

The Gunmen exchange looks he can't read. Finally, Byers says, "There's a lot to fill you in on, Mulder."

He's slightly worried now - if some random agents are up here collecting evidence (why the hell are random agents up here, anyway, he and Scully aren't popular enough for that), they probably won't know how to handle it. It was iffy in his mind when he thought it was Skinner. "Seriously, guys, who is it?"

Frohike and Langly exchange wary looks. "Their names are Doggett and Reyes," Byers says. "Do you know them?"   
***

He goes to see Scully as soon as the nurse clears him. ("No overexerting yourself," she says sternly, and he agrees absently. He wants to see his wife, who he's alternately thought was dead or dying or trapped in another shared hallucination with him. There is a lot they need to talk about, but that can all come later. The Gunmen agree that filling him in more can wait. He needs to see her.)

On his way, he almost runs into a lanky woman with dark, wild hair. "Oh, excuse me," he says, starting to move past her, but she freezes in her path, hand tightening around her steaming Styrofoam cup. She's staring at him, and something seems familiar about her that Mulder can't place. "Do we, um, do we know each other?" he asks. He thinks he's placed her: the woman from the motel parking lot a few years ago, when they were on the Jimmy Worth case. But he has no idea why he remembers her.

The woman clears her throat uncomfortably. "Um, you could say that…  Fox," she mutters awkwardly, grabbing one wrist in her hand. Her dark eyes suddenly feel incredibly familiar. Like he knew her from years ago.

"Samantha?" he whispers in astonishment.

She smiles a little. "Yeah."

He's frozen in place, in total disbelief. It's been years since he's seen a version of her. "I, I- how?" he stammers.

"Um, Scully found me. Broke me out from the place they kept me for the past couple years," Samantha says sheepishly. She laughs a little, tearfully. "I thought you were dead all these years," she adds, thickly. 

He steps forward to hug her, stiff in his disbelief. "I've been looking for such a long time," he says.

Samantha sniffles, hugging him back. "I'm sorry," she says, stepping back and shoving hair away from her face. "I would've come home if I'd known."

"I would've come and found you if I'd know," he says. He can't believe he's found her, really found her, after all this time. There's a scrape along her hairline, stained red: more proof, even if they haven't seen green blood in the place. She's real. It's really his little sister, after all these years of searching and waiting and hoping.

Samantha is smiling, but she keeps sniffling. She swipes the skin under her eyes with her fingertips, laughs a little."So," she says. "Is this the part where you call me a baby for crying? I haven't had a big brother to pick on me in years."

He laughs. "I can't tease you, actually," he says. "I'm crying, too."

***

Melissa is holding her hand when she wakes up. "Dana," she says frantically. 

"The baby," Scully says, voice rasping, struggling to sit up. "Is the baby…” 

Missy presses a hand to her shoulder. "Calm down, Day, you'll hurt yourself," she says, easing her back against the pillows. "I talked to the doctor and he said the baby's fine, you weren't in the fire long enough to hurt it."

She collapses back against the pillows, eyes sliding close in relief; she smiles, can't help it. She thinks about what she saw before she went under. William. The baby.  _ This is realer than you think. _

"Thank God," she whispers. "And Mulder, is he..."

"He's fine, too." Melissa squeezes her hand before dropping it on the mattress. "My God, Dana, you certainly know how to get yourself into a mess."

The events from before everything went black fall into place. Scully opens her eyes. "Samantha?" she says, uncertainly. 

"She found me. We came up here with some of Fox's weird friends and a couple of FBI agents to save you guys," Melissa says. "Everyone's fine, I promise. There's a... lot that's happened, but everything's okay for right now."

Scully struggles to sit up, a hand ghosting the edge of her abdomen. "You came up here with Samantha and the Gunmen? Missy..."

"Come on, Dana, you can't lecture me about this being dangerous. Not after what's happened." She gives her a stern look that is definitely not the norm for her; Melissa has never been particularly stern in her life. "You're my little sister. I'm not leaving you alone,  okay?"

She's about to protest, but a knock comes on the door before she can, and Monica Reyes pokes her head in. Scully has to hold in a gasp. "Missy, I got you some..." Monica starts, but then she notices Scully sitting up. "Agent Scully," she says with a smile. "I'm glad to see you're awake."

"I, uh, thank you," Scully says, almost breathlessly, gripping the blanket in her hands. She'd always assumed Monica was a part of the other place, not real. Like William. And if Monica is here, then maybe…

"Danes, do you know Monica?" Melissa asks, with a sense of finality that effectively ends their conversation. "She's at the Bureau. Your boss put her and her partner on yours and Mulder's case."

"I've always been fascinated by your unit, actually," Monica grins. "You and Agent Mulder do amazing work."

Scully can't help it; she smiles back. "Thank you."

Monica opens her mouth to say something else, but she's cut off by the doctor at the door. "Agent Scully," he says pleasantly. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Scully says, reaching over to nudge her sister in the arm. "Go with Monica," she tells her softly. "I'm fine. We'll talk later." She'd always thought that Monica Reyes and her sister would like each other if they ever met, and it would seem she is right. 

Melissa looks a little reluctant, but she nods, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek before brushing past the doctor out of the room. Outside, Monica smiles at her, passing her a Styrofoam cup. Melissa smiles back. 

Scully addresses the doctor: "Is my baby okay?"

"The baby is fine," he says. "Although I'd like to do an ultrasound to check that that everything that everything is okay."

She nods, hand moving back to her stomach. "I'd like to wait, if you don't mind," she says. "Until I talk to my partner. I want him to be there, and I haven't told him yet."

The doctor raises an eyebrow, but doesn't comment. "That's fine. Yours and Mr. Mulder's recovery is coming along nicely. There's not much damage, although we'd like to keep you under observation for a little while longer just to be sure. I told your partner he was fine to come and see you, so he should be along any minute, all right?"

Scully nods, the tight knot that had formed in her stomach when she'd found the waiting room empty slowly unraveling. He's safe, they both are. They're safe, and so is his sister and her sister, and Monica Reyes exists and they're going to have a baby. 

She and the doctor go over her recovery and the loss of the chip - her throat burns a little, but she's breathing fine and doesn't feel too woozy. The unusual brain activity they observed after removing the chip is, she suspects, what she saw with William. By all odds, she should believe that it was all the hallucinogens, but somehow she doesn't. She has a feeling and she can't explain it, but it feels like it did before, with William, in the other place. Exactly the same. Like they have some kind of unexplainable connection. It's crazy, and it goes against everything she's argued for for years, but she just knows. Like she knows that this is the real universe, and the other place is a hallucination or some shadowy otherworld or both. She can't explain it and she finally might have lost her mind - Mulder will never let her live this down - but she  _ just knows _ .

The doctor leaves her alone with instructions to rest, and not to let Mulder stay too long or for either of them to overexert themselves. Scully slithers back down under the covers, curling on her side and leaning her face into the cool, scratchy pillowcase. There's a lot she's still confused about, a lot she still needs to know. She still has no idea what happened in those woods. (There are flashes of Billy Miles and Theresa Nemmens and a few other young people, faces white and nervous as they walked into the light; heat and flames and and smoke , but that's all.) But they are safe and that's all that matters. 

There's a tap at the door and then his voice, scratchy and wavering but  _ whole _ and  _ there _ : "Scully?"

She scrambles to her knees on top of the mattress. He's there, standing in the doorway, and his face brightens. She blinks hard, smiling at him uncontrollably. "Mulder," she says. "Mulder, it's me."  _ Just so you know.  _

He moves forward as she shuffles to the end of the bed. Mulder gathers her up in his arms, pulling her hard against him, fingers scraping over her back. Her feet slip off of the edge of the bed, dangling a few inches over the floor; he's holding her tight enough that she doesn't hit the ground. She hugs him back just as tightly, gratefully, whispering, “You okay?”

“I'm okay," he whispers back. "Are you okay? God, Scully, I was so scared. I'm so sorry I left you alone there."

"It's okay, it's okay, I was just scared for you," she says hollowly, defenses down. Her fingers dig into his shoulders.

He buries his face in her neck, running his hands up and down her spine. " _ Scully, _ ” he whispers in soft awe to her collarbone. “I can't believe you found her.” 

She smiles, slipping down until her feet hit the linoleum. "You saw Samantha," she says.

He nods, eyes soft and wet. "Thank you," he whispers, grabbing her hand before she can lower it to her side and kissing her knuckles. "I've been looking for so long, and you... you've saved me in so many ways now, Scully." He squeezes her fingers. 

She squeezes back. "Don't make me out to be some kind of hero, Mulder. It was completely an accident. I'm just glad I did find her."

"All this time..." he says, hushed. "I still can't believe it."

"I know," she agrees. She can't believe it herself. Samantha was an abstract concept for such a long time, and now she's a real person, someone who Scully has gotten to know as someone outside of "Mulder's sister". Someone who Mulder can get to know now, a family member he can see at holidays. More than a quest, not the ghost of the little girl who's been haunting Mulder for forty-seven years. "It's incredible."

Mulder squeezes her hand again, and leads her to sit on the bed. "Are you, are you really okay?" he asks, sitting beside her, knees pressed together. He brushes hair off of her forehead. "I mean, the doctor's appointment... was it..." He swallows, nervous, little kid scared again.

She smiles, grasping his hand in both of hers and tugging it into her lap. Here it is, the chance she'd missed out on all these years ago. "It wasn't cancer," she says, tracing circles on the back of Mulder's right hand with her thumb. He closes his eyes in relief. She lets go of his hand with one of hers, brushing her fingertips over his cheek; he opens his eyes, meeting hers. She strokes his cheek again, hand trembling. "Mulder, I'm pregnant."

His eyes widen, and he gapes at her in disbelief for a moment. "You're... you're pregnant?" he says, uncertain. She nods, eyes brimming over. He smiles suddenly, tugging her closer. "Scully, that’s incredible!" Their mouths collide; she folds her arms around his neck to tug him closer. When she pulls away, he leans down and rests his forehead against hers. "I love you," he whispers.

"I love you," she says in return. It used to be like pulling teeth to say it, too terrifying to put it out there, like what they had would shatter, but here, now, everything seems a lot less fragile. 

He pulls away suddenly, eyes frantic. "Wai-wait, is the baby okay? Did it get hurt?"

"He's fine, he's fine," Scully says quickly."The doctor told me. They want to do an ultrasound, I asked him to wait for you."

His eyes flood with relief, and he kisses her cheek. "That's, that's good. That's great." He's clearly nervous, but he can't stop smiling and is powerfully endearing in this one, golden moment. "You said  _ he _ ," he adds quietly. 

She blinks. "What?"

"You said  _ he _ ," he says. "About the baby. Do you know what it is? Can you find out this early?"

"Oh, um, no, it's not..." Scully laughs nervously, licking her lips. "You're going to think I'm crazy."

Mulder chuckles. "Scully, as well as you know me, do you really think I'd think you're crazy?"

"Crazy for  _ me _ ," she says pointedly. 

"Never," he says, shaking his head. Then, more seriously: "Scully, what is it?"

She sucks in a nervous breath. “The baby…” she says. “I think it’s William.”

His eyes widen. “How do you…” 

“You’re going to think I’m insane, but… I had a vision. I saw him, right before they took the chip out. He said what Boggs said… that he was realer than I thought.” She blinks back tears. “I know it’s insane, but I have a feeling.”

Mulder looks quietly astonished. “You believe it?” he asks incredulously. She nods. “Can I get that on the record?” he says eagerly, and she laughs wetly. He kisses her nose. “I believe you,” he says quietly. “I saw him, too. When the chip came out." 

She smiles, thumbing his wet cheekbone. “It’s possible,” she says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

He leans down, kissing her stomach. “Hi, baby,” he says. She smiles.

She does suggest that they need to get some rest in order to fully recover, and he agrees immediately that she needs her rest, but his eyes take on that wide, puppy effect that secretly melts her a little on the inside, says, "I don't know if I'm ready to leave you." In the end, they curl together on her tiny hospital bed, Mulder's head resting on her shoulder, nose pressed into her hair. Her hand settles back on her stomach - it's a habit at this point, but she thinks she's earned the right to be protective - and his heavy palm curls over hers. They sleep. Scully only arises from her muzzy haze once, at the sound of Melissa's voice: "Fox, you'd better take care of her." She's teasing, but it has an edge of seriousness to it.

"I will," he says, groggy but determined. "We'll take care of each other."   
***

They find out the next day what's happened in their absence from reality: the Syndicate had tried to start a war with the aliens using abductees as bait and had promptly been abducted. (Monica and Doggett - who also exists in this universe - had visited them and relayed the facts as Skinner was sending them in: that popular abduction sites had similar events as what had happened here. Luckily, there hadn't been any casualties reported among the abductees, which seems ridiculously lucky, considering the effects from the fire in the Bellefleur woods. Doggett seems to be irritated, slightly, at the entire ordeal; Scully wouldn't expect anything different.) There's a series of reporters who apparently want to talk to them, and Bellefleur, the abduction site with the largest fallout, is featured on every news channel. 

(They watch an interview with Skinner [who's exposed the conspiracy] on the tiny TV in Scully's hospital room. "I can't help but feel a little cheated," Mulder says, teasing. "Wasn't this supposed to be my gig?" 

"You'll get over it," she says.)

They exchange stories of their search for each other. Mulder ends up being the one to tell Scully about Charlie’s abduction; Melissa's been avoiding the subject, staring sheepishly at the floor when Scully asks her how Charlie is involved.

Scully is almost numb with shock at the news. Somehow, throughout all the different realities they've lived through, she'd never expected her family to be a part of this. 

"Scully, I'm so sorry," Mulder says. He touches her hand gingerly. "If it helps anything... from what I saw at your parents' house, he seemed to really regret it. He refused to be a part of this Syndicate bullshit my dad was recruiting him for, this… war. He said he wanted to protect his family. Skinner says he called in the tip that sent Doggett and Reyes up here."

Scully nods, staring at her hands in her lap. She has no idea what to say. She makes it clear she wants to be alone, so Mulder kisses her on the forehead and leaves. 

He returns to his room to find Samantha standing awkwardly in the doorway, facing the room. "Samantha, what..." he starts (cautiously, trying not to scare her), but when she turns, he sees who's in the room: their father. 

"Get in here and close the door, Fox," Bill Mulder says.

He does. Samantha is tense, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. "What the hell are you doing here, Dad?" she snaps. "I'm guessing you're not here to check on your injured kids."

Bill blinks at them. He's not used to being talked to this way, and definitely not from Samantha. "I'm glad you're okay, sweetheart," he says.

"Oh, bullshit," she growls. "You screwed us over, both of us. You knew this was coming, and you didn't do a thing to stop it! You didn't do anything to save Fox."

"I did," their father says, matter-of-fact. "I tried everything I could. I made sure Bill Scully called in a tip to the FBI. I contacted my friends inside to try to figure out how to shut off your chip, Fox. I did everything I possibly could, under the circumstances."

Rage bubbles up in Mulder unexpectedly. "What about the other abductees?" 

"What?" 

"The other abductees," he snaps. "Samantha. My wife. Why didn't you try to save them?"

"I... the Project was too far along to..."

"Bullshit," Samantha says. Her face is flushed, and her hands are balled into fists by her sides. 

Their father looks irritated. Like the way he used to get right before he'd start yelling and they'd be sent to their rooms for the rest of the night. But they're all too old for that, now. "I don't have time for this," he says. "I have to go. I have to disappear. You won't see me again."

"What do you mean?" Mulder asks.

"The Project is compromised, obviously. My colleagues are abducted. Fox, your boss released all of the names on the record - I'll be a wanted man in no time. The government will expose the rest of the secrets under no will of their own, the citizens will want answers. Under the circumstances, it seems convenient for me to leave the country."

"So, what, you're gonna run away once things get tough?" Samantha hisses. "You're a coward, Dad. You always have been. I don't know how you're not abducted with your colleagues or what the hell ever, but I'm guessing it's because you chickened out on your  _ spineless _ friends."

Bill Mulder's face contorts. He clenches his jaw. "I am sorry for all the distress I've caused in both of your lives," he says, and brushes past them out the door. Neither of the siblings make a move to follow.

Samantha collapses in the hard chair beside his bed. "Son of a bitch," she groans into her hand. "I hate him."

Mulder sighs, sitting on the edge of the bed. "I do, too," he sighs.

"He fucked up Mom," she says. "Fucked up me, and you, too, from what Scully's told me. He ruined us all."

He sighs again, rubbing circles on his aching temples. "I know," he says. "I just had to tell Scully that her father is involved in all this. This is all an endless fucking cycle of fathers screwing over their children."

They're quiet for a minute. Samantha wrings her hands together in her lap. "You know you're not going to be that way, right?" she offers finally. 

It's all he can think about at times. It certainly hadn't been intentional, in the other place, but he'd still condemned his son to a life to danger. He can never quite forgive himself for that. "I don't know anything," he says. "Scully's father didn't want to doom his family, but he did. They didn't give him a choice. They threatened his family if he didn't."

"There's always a choice," Samantha says fiercely. "And you'd make the right one. I know you, even if you were an asshole preteen the last time I saw you." He laughs. "Besides that, the Syndicate is gone. This should all be over. And if it isn't, there are still ways to fight back." She smiles a little. "You and Scully have people on your side, even if it's not many. And that's something."

After all those years of feeling like they were the only ones fighting the fight, them against the world, hearing that people are on their side is a relief. Mulder smiles too. "You're right," he says. "It is."

***

Bill calls to check on Scully, and she asks Melissa to tell him she's asleep. She honestly doesn't know how to react. After everything that's happened, all the time she's spent reconciling with her parents, she can't wrap her head around it. Melissa seems just as numb, face whitening a little every time it's mentioned. "If it helps, Day, Charlie told me that they forced Dad to participate," she says. "I don't think he would've... willingly participated in this."

Scully twists her cross. "Missy, did Charlie mention when he took out his chip?" she asks softly. 

"Early 1993. Right before he got married. Why do you ask?"

_ Oh, God _ . "That's why they recruited me," she says. "Because of Dad. Because Charlie took the chip out. That's why they wanted me to spy on Mulder."

Melissa's eyes widen. "They wanted you to  _ spy  _ on Fox?" she repeats incredulously. 

Scully twists her ring. "Yeah."

"And you... ended up marrying him."

She laughs a little. "Yeah."

Melissa shakes her head. "Dana, your life is insane. Also, you might be terrible at your job.”

She laughs again, louder now. "I know, believe me. Have I thanked you for getting involved in it for a few days for me?"

"You kind of lectured me, actually. I forgive you, though,” she says dramatically.

Scully sighs, flopping back against the pillows. "I'm sorry, Missy. I just... don't want anything to happen to you." And now that her father is involved, there's no telling  _ what  _ could happen. To any of them.

"Hey, listen, nothing's going to happen to me, okay?" she says fiercely. "To any of us. This is over."

There's no way for her to know that, but Scully wants to believe it's true. And maybe it is. Maybe, now that everyone is safe and the chips are gone and the hallucinations have seemingly stopped, they can finally move on with their lives.

***

It's beyond strange to talk to Monica and Doggett again. Monica is exactly how Scully remembers her from 2002, and nothing like how she remembers her from 2016. (She doesn't know what happened there, but she knows it wasn't right. Monica Reyes would never.) Doggett is essentially the same as well; skeptical and irritable about it. But he's also apologetic for what happened in the forest, shaking their hands before they leave the hospital. (Scully hears him talking on the phone to his son and is immensely relieved. She remembers the days after his son's murderer had been found and she'd given up William; she'd asked him over for drinks to take their minds off things, and they'd both ended up crying for hours until Monica had come over to drive Doggett home. He'd been her friend, in the other place, just as much as Monica, and they'd both helped her get through Mulder's absence and William. She wants him to be happy, both of them to be happy.)

In the end, everyone heads back to DC except for Monica and Doggett, who have to stay back and deal with the fallout. Mulder tries and fails to convince them that he should stay and help, but in the end, Scully convinces him to come home with her. ("You can't send me back by myself, we're past that," she snaps. "And I'm guessing you don't want me to stay because of the baby." "You're right," he says. "So you're coming back with us," she says. "Your sister needs you." He wants to ask if she needs him, but the tenseness in her shoulders answers him. He agrees to come, but leaves his number behind for Doggett and Monica to contact him with if they have any questions.) (Melissa leaves her number with Monica, too, but Scully suspects it's for an entirely different reason.)

Her parents meet them at the airport. Her mother pulls her and Melissa into a hug almost immediately. "Oh, Dana," she sniffles into Scully's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

The weight of her hallucination, her recent grief of her mother's death, overtakes her, and she rests her chin on her mother's shoulder. "I'm fine, Mom," she says. 

"It's okay, Mom," Melissa adds. "Remember when Dana and I started that new school in San Diego, and you made me promise to take care of her? Well, I'm still making good on that promise."

Their mother laughs, reaching out to stroke Scully’s hair. "My girls," she says fondly, pulling away. 

Behind her stands Charlie and her father. "Hi, Dana," Charlie says awkwardly. Almost sheepishly. "Good to see you again, Mulder."

Mulder says something polite back, but Scully doesn't hear it. Her eyes are on her father. He looks like he's about to cry; she's only ever seen him cry a few times that she can remember. 

He intakes a shaky breath. "Starbuck..." he begins. "I am... so sorry."

Scully laces her fingers together so tightly that they turn white. "Dad, it's okay," she says softly, even though she's not sure she means it. "It's okay."

He grabs her in a tight embrace. "I didn't… I wouldn't have. But they said they'd kill you. All of you. I had to…” 

Behind him, Charlie sniffs, looks at the ground. Scully's stomach twists into knots. She hugs her father back. "It's okay," she says. "I forgive you."

Her mother is crying openly. Melissa loops a stiff arm around her shoulder. Behind them, Mulder and Samantha cluster awkwardly, shards of a broken family. Hers feels a little broken, too. But she thinks it can be fixed.

***

They get home a few hours later. The Gunmen and Melissa had sheepishly apologized for "the mess", but she didn't actually expect the pile of dishes in the sink or the blankets on the couch or the congealing coffee stain on the counter.

Mulder locks the door behind them, slumping against the door. "I was so scared," he says. "When I came home to the mess… with you gone."

She sighs, brushing her fingers across his hand. "I was, too. I thought... it doesn't matter what I thought. I'm just glad you're okay."

He tugs her against him, holding her tightly. "How are you doing?" he asks softly. "With this... family stuff."

"I could ask you the same question." She wraps her arms around his neck, leaning her forehead against his shoulder. "I'm okay," she replies, just as softly. "I don't... I don't know, I think I need some time to process. But even with this... how could I ever be anything but grateful? My family is alive and safe."

He kisses her hair, hand pressing into the small of her back. "That's how I feel," he says. 

He and Samantha are planning to drive up and see their mother the next day. They are slowly, gingerly, forming a bond. Her family is alive, they found and saved his sister, the aliens are gone (hopefully forever), and they're going to have a baby. Scully smiles, kisses his shoulder. "We're okay," she says, rising up to kiss his forehead. "We're going to be okay."

***

Their son is born in the fall. It's about the most uneventful birth that either of them could've expected, and for that, Scully is grateful. 

(It's  _ him _ , and they both recognize it. Scully grips his arm, after the nurses carry him off to clean him up, presses her sweat-soaked forehead into his upper arm and whispers, “It’s William, it's really William. We were right.” Mulder is only able to nod, speechless. He looks the same as he did in a flickery-lit dirty room in Georgia, curled fetally in Scully’s arms.)

(Melissa comes to visit and brings Samantha, who's been staying at her apartment while she takes some college classes. "It's convenient," she jokes. "We only have to make one trip to both meet our new nephew." And Scully wants to cry at that, because they never had a chance to meet him, before.)

(Samantha and Mulder are off to the side, teasing each other while she tickles William's feet. She looks a lot healthier, a lot happier. Missy seems happy, too; she and Monica have been spending a lot of time together. Scully doesn't bother trying to hold back her tears when Melissa leans down to hug her. "Hormones," she sniffles into her shoulder.)

Later, Mulder is sitting on the bed beside her with the baby, and she's pretending to sleep against her shoulder, when he whispers, "Let's have another," against her temple.

She hits him in the shoulder, growling, "You're hilarious. Talk to me in four years or so."

He winces, but dips his head to kiss her hair. "He's so perfect," he says. "We made this, Scully."

He's not a miracle here, but to her, he'll always be one. She runs her fingers over her son's arm and he makes a small sound. "Hi," she whispers.  _ I'm not leaving you this time,  _ she thinks.

***

The aliens never come back.

Mulder jokes like he's disappointed, but he's glad. Never seeing proof of extraterrestrials and his family being safe and alive is an exchange he can live with.

***

_ March 6, 2000 _

They're sitting on the couch with a sleeping toddler in between them. William breathes snuffily against Mulder's knee, fist curled around the hem of Scully's t-shirt. Scully’s half-asleep with her head tipped against the back of the couch, and Mulder brushes her hand. "Happy anniversary," he says softly. She opens one eye to look at him. "Of the day we met, I mean," he adds.

She reaches down to smooth William's dark bedhead. "How long has it been? Seven years?"

"Officially. Thirty unofficially."

"I thought Hell didn't count."

"You said it counted when you agreed to marry me." 

He grins mischievously, and she rolls her eyes and kisses him. "You're ridiculous," she says affectionately. "I need to get Will to bed." She hauls their son into her arms, cradling his head against her shoulder. 

Mulder catches her elbow before she can leave. "Do you remember what I told you all those years ago? In the other place?" 

"You said that maybe there was hope. And you were right." She nudges him in the side. "You were actually right about something."

"Ha ha," he says dryly. "I was actually talking about the other thing.” She nods, and he continues, more seriously, “I said I wanted to believe the dead weren't lost to us. And I was right about that, too. My sister. Your sister. Our parents."

"The Gunmen," she says. "Pendrell."

"Deep Throat. X. Krychek. If they even exist, that is."

She swallows roughly. "There was no way for Emily to have survived," she says softly, and her arms visibly tighten around William. "But maybe the fact that she never had a chance to exist, or suffer, is maybe a mercy in itself."

"I think that's a good way of looking at it," he says softly, reaching over to brush her hand. 

She looks down at William, eyes soft and sad. "I always felt like I failed her," she says. "Him. Like I was a bad mother because I didn't try harder. I never guaranteed that William would be safer, not really, and I condemned us to have to live with the fact that I gave him up for years. And with Emily... who's to say I kept her from more pain? Who’s to say she wouldn’t have had a good life if she’d lived and we’d been the ones to raise her?"

"You can't... you can't speculate on what could have happened if you'd make a different choice." Mulder reaches across the couch and pulls her hand into his. "I've done plenty of it, believe me, and I know: it eats away at you. And you can never know for sure. You can’t put that kind of burden on yourself." She sniffles, nods. He squeezes her fingers. "But here's the thing, Scully: we get a second chance that no one else could possibly have. That doesn't necessarily mean that everything's fixed, or even that we'll be happier than we were. We just have to make sure we take the opportunity. To be happy, to change things."

She smiles, kissing the top of William's head. "Are you happy?" she asks softly. 

"I can't remember the last time I was this happy."

She turns and kisses him, their noses brushing. "It's late," she says. "I really do need to get him to bed. "

"Okay." Mulder strokes William's hair, leaning down to kiss his head. "Night, buddy," he murmurs. 

Scully carries their son down the hall to his bedroom. They'd bought a new apartment after they'd found out she was pregnant: a place without bloodstains or ghosts. It's refreshing. She tucks Will in and kisses his forehead. She turns on the nightlight in the corner and leaves the door open, just in case. 

Mulder's dozing off, sprawled across the bed. "Mulder?" she says, running her fingers along his cheek. "Do you remember what I said in that hotel room in the other place? What I told you again when we came back?"

He opens his eyes and looks up at her. "You said you'd do it all over again," he says, leaning his head against her hip. 

She strokes his forehead. "There's never been a time, in this place or the other one, where that's changed."

Mulder smiles, kisses her hipbone. “Even with all those times I proved you wrong?” he wants to know. 

Scully rolls her eyes. 

"Me too," he whispers. 

He takes her hand and tugs her down in the mattress beside him. They curl around each other, foreheads pressed together, noses brushing. 

Outside, it starts to rain.


End file.
